Stir It Up: Musical Mixes from Roots to Jazz

Santoro, music critic for New York's Daily News and the Nation, has compiled 31 previously published essays from those publications and others to create as useful an introduction to popular music as you're likely to find. Here he demonstrates the great richness and diversity of the influences used by the best musicians of the past half century. Santoro profiles crafty postmoderns like Paul Simon and Sting, and rightly so, but it's through articles on jazz musicians like Ornette Coleman and Julius Hemphill, through interviews with Brazil's Gilberto Gil and Zimbabwe's Thomas Mapfumo, and through surveys of modern Cuban and Hawaiian music that Stir It Up makes its most important point: before multiculturalism was a word, cross-cultural borrowings have long been the inspiration for great music. Santoro's on target about everything from the importance of borrowing to his thoughts on Sam Cooke (not the victim of musical handlers he's been made out to be). A deft spotter of influences, he's also got descriptive flair: when he describes how Afropop song structure breaks from the Tin Pan Alley tune, we hear it. If you love music, but don't know how Stevie Wonder influenced Bob Marley, what Cuban dance craze made Professor Longhair's sound possible, or which Byrds, Grateful Dead or Hendrix tunes were inspired by John Coltrane, you ought to read this book. (July)