The odd thing about the history of recorded music—what makes it hard to compare to, say, the history of books—is that it's obviously finite. While books go back to the beginning of recorded history, there are still people alive who were born before recorded music as we know it existed. Every year, a host of books on music attempt to tell the story; many strive to connect the dots between the various points in recorded music's roughly 100-year history. This year is no exception: there's a slew of new biographies, music criticism, photo books and cultural histories.
But this is a unique moment in the history of recorded music—by 2009, the transition from physical CDs to dowloadable MP3s has been pretty much completed. While CDs are still part of the picture, nobody thinks that digital downloads are a passing phase anymore. Music is more readily available than ever before, and whether they're paying for it or not, more people are listening to more kinds of music than ever. This year's crop of music books reflects a highly aware readership eager to get deep into the crannies of the music they love, to find new artists and to look back at the music of the past. Publishers and editors are excited about these books because they cater to a market the recession can't kill: music itself is cheap if not (illegally) free, and books are an equally affordable way for fans to dig deeper.
Musical Myths Debunked: Biographies
Biographies of famous musical figures abound, some groundbreaking, others digging up old dirt. For jazz lovers, one of the most interesting is likely to be Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original by Robin D.G. Kelley. To say the least, Thelonious Monk, with his pork-pie hat and scruffy goatee, was an enigmatic figure, one of the major composers and pianists in jazz as well as a founding father of bebop. He's a figure in need of reassessment, and that's what Kelley does—he focuses on Monk the man, who raised a family, maintained close friendships, was a popular guy around his New York neighborhood and suffered from mental illness toward the end of his life.
“I'm battling a tradition of artist biographies that focus on the individual genius, and I kind of challenge that idea—it takes a village,” Kelly tells PW.
Martin Beiser, senior editor at Free Press, who edited Thelonious Monk, says this book is “a major event in its own right,” and that now is as good a time as any to publish it. “I'm not sure this is the kind of book you time,” he says. “We are a culture that always looks backwards to see where we came from. With Monk you're looking not only at the history of American music, but African-American history, and he was very involved with the civil rights movement.” Kelley hopes to turn a few new people on to Monk: “The music tells a story. Especially when you know the personal story behind it, that he wrote many of these songs for his family, you hear it differently,” said Kelley.
Another notable bio for this season is Pops (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Dec.), in which Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout tells the life of jazz legend Louis Armstrong. Teachout looked at previously unseen sources, including backstage tapes, to recast Armstrong's life, especially the latter half.
Of course, this year's bios aren't just about jazz. Paul McCartney: A Life by Peter Ames Carlin is almost certain to be the most popular bio this season, spurred in part by EMI's September reissue of the remastered Beatles catalogue. Continuum is also bringing out compact bios of two of rock 'n' roll's founders. Little Richard: The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll was written by poet David Kirby, who went back to Little Richard's Georgia roots and interviewed people who knew him, painting a picture of an ambitious artist bent on greatness. In Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, writer Joe Bonomo strives to see through the controversy surrounding Lewis's marriage to a 13-year-old cousin, among other things, to figure out where his music came from and what it meant, and continues to mean, to history.
Creative Collaborators: Music Criticism
For music writers, one of the hardest and most alluring challenges is to figure out how to transfer the abstract thoughts and feelings engendered by listening to music to words, sentences and paragraphs. And while space for album and concert reviews is shrinking in newspapers and magazines, music writing, both by average listeners and professional critics, is booming on the infinite pagescape of the Internet, a subject, in fact, which music critic David Hajdu treats in detail in his forthcoming collection of essays, Heroes and Villains. Hajdu is the music critic for the New Republic, and in these essays and reviews, he takes an in-depth look at the gamut of contemporary music, from the White Stripes to John Zorn, from Woody Guthrie to Kanye West, from Joni Mitchell to Taylor Swift. He's an exacting critic, and a great place to go for a thinking man's take on today's music. Hajdu, who is also the author of Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn and Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina, tells PW, “It's an extraordinary time to be involved in music. It's more collaborative, less passive, because anyone can take files of recorded music and remix them, do mashups or pretty much do whatever they want with them. Members of the contemporary musical audience are no longer just listeners; they're creative collaborators, if they want to be.” And readers of a book like Hajdu's are equally likely to turn to their blogs or Facebook pages and weigh in on the bands Hajdu talks about.
For a comprehensive take on what is often referred to as America's classical music, there is Jazz by Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux, a doorstopper narrative of the genre as a whole. Giddins is one of America's leading jazz critics, a regular contributor to the Village Voice and author of many popular books on jazz. DeVeaux is a nationally known scholar of jazz. The two together present one of the most comprehensive histories of the genre ever published, tracing jazz from its pre—20th-century roots to its contemporary practitioners in a book that will appeal to listeners, students and players of jazz.
Paul Edwards's How to Rap is a scholarly how-to for would-be rappers and an exhaustive explanation of what is now unarguably a serious art form for the rest of us. Edwards goes into everything from why rappers freestyle to the challenges of collaboration in hip-hop. But Edwards wants to distinguish himself from other hip-hop writers who use the music as a jumping-off point to talk about other issues: “I wanted to approach hip-hop with the focus on the artists and their music, looking at it from their perspectives and on their terms,” he says. “Sometimes it does get complex, because the techniques are often intricate when you break them down, but I didn't want to go off into academic territory for the sake of it. I don't think every time a rapper opens his/her mouth you have to submerge their words in socioeconomic academic analysis.”
Susan Betz, the editor for How to Rap at Chicago Review Press, agrees that this book brings up complex issues. “Tracing the evolution of a pop culture trend is not as clear-cut as tracing the evolution of something like the various versions of Microsoft Word or the models of the Kindle. Pop culture is too diverse, ephemeral and fast moving,” she says.
Poet, anthologist and critic David Lehman performs another kind of reassessment in A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, the newest entry in the Jewish Encounters series from Nextbook and Schocken, which pairs Jewish writers and subjects that deal with Jewish culture. Basically, Lehman contends that songs from the Golden Age of American songwriting (like “Embraceable You” and “Cheek to Cheek,” which have become standards and were written by Jews) also tell the story of what it was like to be a Jew in America. Lehman says he became “convinced that I could present a unified phenomenon: the Jewish masters of the 32-bar song from the point of view of a Jewish poet. Where did they come from, and how did they transform their past into the hit parade of modern America?” The result is a wonderfully compelling and poetic analysis that re-envisions the American songbook.
Missed the Show? Look at the Book: Photo Books
Maybe you missed the concert. Or maybe the whole tour happened two decades before you were born. Or maybe you were there, but your memories are a bit hazy. Photo books seem like they were made for music: the dramatic poses, big personalities, pyrotechnic stage shows. This year's bunch will take you back, or take you there for the first time.
Sterling is publishing a lovely and lavish photographic chronicle of one of the hotbeds of American music in the 1960s and '70s: Canyon of Dreams: The Magic and Music of Laurel Canyon by Harvey Kubernik gorgeously narrates the lives of musicians—like Joni Mitchell; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; the Doors; the Eagles—who lived, partied and wrote songs in Laurel Canyon, Calif. Sterling editor Michael Fragnito says that people like himself are the ideal and eager audience for Canyon of Dreams: “We really think there's a strong nostalgia market. I'm of a certain age that when this book was presented to me, it really brought me back.” In a similar vein, there's Rock & Roll:... And the Beat Goes On by radio legend “Cousin Brucie” Morrow. Morrow offers his picks for the greatest artists of the 1950s, '60s and '70s, when his baby boomer audience was ravenous for new records, and music was changing at lightning speed. Beautifully designed and stuffed with photos, it'll make anyone nostalgic, boomer or not.
Perhaps more shocking, though no less nostalgia-inducing, is Let It Bleed: The Rolling Stones, Altamont, and the End of the Sixties by Ethan A. Russell, the only photographer on the fateful 1969 Stones tour that ended in violence and a stabbing death at the now infamous Altamont concert, a sobering wakeup call to many about the dangers of rock and roll culture. Karen Murgolo, editorial director of Grand Central's Springboard Press imprint, says the book appeals to a younger and older audience: “the audience divides into two markets: the boomers who lived through the era—they love the nostalgia and the insight behind the scenes of a Stones tour. I've also found a lot of 20-somethings are major fans of the Rolling Stones, and they are really hungry to learn about that historic (to them) time period and to see the photos of a younger Jagger and Richards.”
The Jazz Loft Project is more esoteric. It's a collection of photos and other materials between 1957 and 1965 from photographer W. Eugene Smith, who, according to the book's editor at Knopf, Victoria Wilson, was determined to complete a photo project on Pittsburgh in 1957, but “had a nervous breakdown and moved into this down and out loft, and it sort of took him over.” The loft, on Sixth Avenue and 28th Street in New York City, became a kind of rehearsal space and site for impromptu jam sessions for some of the most important jazz musicians of the era. The book is filled with Smith's incredible photos of people like Thelonious Monk, Zoot Sims and even Norman Mailer and Salvador Dalí. Plus there are evocative shots from Smith's window of New York in the 1950s and '60s. Wilson, along with the book's author, Sam Stephenson, sorted through the never-before-seen photos Stephenson recently found in Smith's archive to compile the book. “It isn't just a book,” says Wilson. “It's a whole media event,” including a traveling photo exhibition beginning at Lincoln Center and a 10-week series of NPR broadcasts starting in October. For jazz fans, photography lovers and those interested in mid-century New York, this book will be essential.
Music lovers may be the only people more ravenous about the object of their passion than book people. They are always hungry for more music, and ever eager to know more about the music they love, a good thing for publishers of books about music. And at this crossroads of music history—when the very way we listen to music and how we find it is in flux, music lovers want to think about where they came from and where they're going. “Every generation eventually reconnects with its past, and younger people are always curious about what came before them,” says Jack Boulware, coauthor of Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day, also coming out this season. And given all the changes in how we find and acquire new music, technological changes which in fact may bridge generations of parents and kids who swap MP3s, it's a good time to look back and forward. More than anything else, these books will bring listeners back to the music itself, the best thing a music book can do, sending readers to their CD collections—or their iTunes libraries, as the case may be.
Bowie: A Biography by Mark Spitz. Crown, $26.99, Oct. ISBN 978-0-307-39396.
Veteran rock journalist Spitz takes an in-depth look at the protean David Bowie, whose many phases tell the story of 30 years of a changing culture and music business.
Strange Things Happen: A Life with the Police, Polo and Pygmies by Stewart Copeland. HarperStudio, $19.99, Oct. ISBN 978-0-06-179149-9.
Police drummer (and founder) Stewart Copeland tells his life story—from his childhood as the son of a CIA agent to his skyrocketing success with the Police in the 1980s, his work as an award-winning composer of film scores, his wealthy middle age and the recent Police reunion tour.
On the more musicianly side of things, there's Bill Bruford: The Autobiography (Jawbone, $19.95 978-1-906002-23-7), by a drummer who no self-respecting fan of progressive rock can ignore. Bruford has played with Yes, King Krimson, Genesis, as well as his own jazz-inflected groups, and has had a tremendous influence on drumming since the 1970s.
Corn Flakes with John Lennon and Other Tales from the Rock 'n' Roll Life by Robert Hilburn. Rodale, $24.99, Oct. ISBN 978-1-59486-921-1.
Rock critic Robert Hilburn chronicles intimate encounters with the major figures of rock since the '60s—including Lennon, Dylan, Waits and many more.
In the Heart of the Beat: The Poetry of Rap by Alexs Pate. Rowman & Littlefield/Scarecrow Press, $24.95, Nov. ISBN 978-0-8108-6008-2.
Pate looks at rappers from Tupac to Li'l Wayne, analyzing their lyrics as poetry, with an anthology at the back to prove his point.
And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records by Larry Harris with Curt Gooch and Jeff Suhs. Backbeat Books, 24.99, Oct. ISBN 978-0-87930-982-4.
Casablanca cofounder tells the story of the label that launched Kiss, George Clinton, the Village People and many others.
Who Shot Rock and Roll: A Photographic History 1955—Present by Gail Buckland. Knopf, $40, Oct. ISBN 978-0-307-270160.
This unique book looks at the photographers who brought us iconic images of our rock heroes, as well as at the pictures they took.
The Grateful Dead Scrapbook: The Long, Strange Trip in Stories, Photos and Memorabilia by Ben Fong-Torres. Chronicle, $40, Oct. ISBN 978-0-8118-7089-4.
Legendary Rolling Stone editor Fong-Torres takes fans back through the Dead's endless tour in this beautiful gift book, which includes a CD of never-before-heard interviews with the band.
For a list of titles included in this article, including ISBNs, go to www.publishersweekly.com/musicbookbiblio.
|
