New Books In Music

To introduce his book Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk, and the Creation of Fusion (Duke, 2011),Kevin Fellezs quotes Jeff Beck: “For Christ’s sake, I wish somebody would make up a name for this kind of music, ’cause it ain’t jazz and it ain’t rock.” Beck’s words echo Fellezs’s argument, namely, that 1970’s fusion artists situated themselves in the “broken middle” between already established genres like rock, jazz, and funk. They liberally borrowed elements from many musical styles, often to the dismay of genre purists. Fellezs provides a detailed theoretical discussion of the social construction of genre using fusion as an empirical example of how new genres emerge through the appropriation of elements of those that already exist. Fellezs also shows how our conceptions of genre are intimately linked to our ideas about larger social categories–in this case fusion artists are seen as crossing the racially charged boundaries of jazz and rock.

“Before reggae there was rock steady, and before that, ska,” writes Cedella Marley in the foreword to Heather Augustyn’s 2010 book Ska: An Oral History (McFarland, 2010). By way of interviews with dozens of ska musicians, Augustyn traces the history of the music from its Jamaican roots, through its 2Tone revival in 1970’s and 80’s England, to its current regional popularity in the United States. She interviewed Derrick Morgan, Doreen Shaffer, Laurel Aitken, Toots Hibert, Judge Dread, Roddy Radiation, Dave Wakeling, Pauline Black, Kix Thompson, and Buster Bloodvessel to name just a few. The book provides a solid understanding of ska as a music with roots in American jazz and soul mixed with the indigenous music of the Carribean. Augustyn’s interviews also highlight the importance of Jamaica’s status as a former colony in the creation of English ska as well as providing an insight into the music’s reflection of British and Jamaican race and class relations. Most i

One hallmark of important art, in any medium, is a thoughtful relation with artistic precursors. Every artist reckons with heroes and rivals, influences and nemeses, and the old work becomes a part of the new. In Adam Bradley’s seminal monograph on hip-hop lyrics, Book of Rhymes, legendary MC Mos Def describes his desire to participate in posterity: “I wanted it to be something that was durable. You can listen to all these Jimi records and Miles records and Curtis Mayfield records; I wanted to be able to add something to that conversation.” In the last thirty years, technology has transformed the conversation between past and present musicians: it is now possible to quote a previous work not only note for note, but byte for byte. The turntable and the sampler are the hip-hop artist’s quintessential instruments. The culture of hip-hop bricolage, coupled with intense commercial pressures in the recording industry and an inevitable proliferation of rip-off artists, has created difficult c

When I arrived at college in the early 1980s, drugs were cool, music was cool, and drug-music was especially cool. The coolest of the cool drug-music bands was The Velvet Underground. They were from the mean streets of New York City (The Doors were from the soft parade of L.A….); they hung out with Andy Warhol (The Beatles hung out with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi…); they had a female drummer (The Grateful Dead had two drummers, but that still didn’t help…); and, of course, they did heroin. Or at least they wrote a famous song about it. We did not do heroin, but we thought that those who did–like Lou Reed and the rest–were hipper than hip. I imagine we would have done it if there had been any around (thank God for small favors). We thought we had discovered something new. But as Eric C. Schneider points out in his marvelous Smack: Heroin and the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), the conjunction of music, heroin, and cool was hardly an invention of my generat

“On July 5, 1954, Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore, and Bill Black forever changed musical history,” writes Sheree Homer in Catch that Rockabilly Fever: Personal Stories of Life on the Road and in the Studio (McFarland, 2010). It was on this day that the trio recorded Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup’s “That’s All Right” at Sam Phillips’ Sun Recording Studio in Memphis, Tennessee. Rockabilly was born. Rockabilly is a rambunctious musical style that combines the liveliest elements of country, gospel, and rhythm and blues. Homer captures the essence of rockabilly through biographical vignettes of forty-six rockabilly artists including Carl Mann, Elvis Presley, Ronnie Hawkins, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Ricky Nelson, Laura Lee Perkins, High Noon, and Cari Lee Merritt. These portraits include legends as well as newcomers, southerners as well as Californians, pioneers as well as revivalists. Much of Homer’s material come from personal interviews with the artists the

Speaking to long time theater critic Peter Filichia, one is reminded of listening to an old-time sportwriter talk about baseball. The Broadway he describes is full of colorful personalities, anecdotes, dates, numbers, and trivia. His spirit is enthusiastic and infectious: he’s turned his love of Broadway into a career. It’s a wonderful counterpoint to the all-too-typical theater discussions about what’s broken in the non-profit system or funding models. His book, Broadway Musicals: The Biggest Hit and the Biggest Flop of the Season 1959-2009 (Applause, 2010), is more than just fun (though it is that!). The writing is clear and generous, and the stories occasionally revelatory. (Did you know that Edward Albee wrote a failed draft of the “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” musical? Did you know that Sir Peter Hall once suggested that the best way to get the effect of zero gravity was . . . trampolines?) What strikes me most, though, is how Filichia’s own personal experience feeds

SST Records was a seminal label in Los Angeles’s independent music scene of the 1980’s. Founded in 1978 by Greg Ginn, SST released records by a slew of influential bands such as Black Flag, Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Saint Vitus, Husker Du, and Sonic Youth, to name just a few. Naomi Petersen was SST’s staff photographer for much of the 1980s. Finding out about Naomi’s death in 2005, a full two years after the fact, spurred Joe Carducci, part owner of SST Records from 1981-1986, to write Enter Naomi: SST, L.A. and All That… (Redoubt Press, 2007). In it he not only tells Naomi’s story, but also the story of SST and, to a lesser extent, the story of the L.A. punk scene in the early eighties. Carducci sensitively portrays Naomi as a young woman finding her art and passion in the distinctly masculine worlds of SST and punk rock. Along the way he tells the stories of many of the characters that made SST the pioneering indie label that it was.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

In the Soviet Union, artists lived lives that were at once charmed and cursed. Though relatively poor, the USSR poured resources into the arts. The Party created a large, well-funded cultural elite of which only two things were expected. First, that they practice their art. Second–and here’s the rub–that they tow the Party’s ideological line. Art under Communism was intended to enlighten the working class. In practice, that meant hewing to hackneyed tropes (“Socialist Realism”). Worse still, the Party could and did change its line at will. What was “progressive” one day could be “reactionary” the next. This made the lives of Soviet artists unpredictable. It was hard to say what the Party bosses’ would want from one year to the next. In his masterful The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years (Oxford UP, 2009), Simon Morrison offers an excellent example and analysis of the dilemmas Soviet artists faced. When Prokofiev came back to