Beyond A Love Supreme

John Coltrane's A Love Supreme is widely considered one of the greatest jazz albums of all time. In Beyond A Love Supreme, author Tony Whyton explores both the musical aspects of A Love Supreme, and the album's seminal importance in jazz history, as well as its broader musical and cultural impact.

John Coltrane's A Love Supreme is widely considered one of the greatest jazz albums of all time. In Beyond A Love Supreme, author Tony Whyton explores both the musical aspects of A Love Supreme, and the album's seminal importance in jazz history, as well as its broader musical and cultural impact.

Few albums in the canon of popular music have had the influence, resonance, and endurance of John Coltrane's 1965 classic A Love Supreme-a record that proved jazz was a fitting medium for spiritual exploration and for the expression of the sublime. Bringing the same fresh and engaging approach that characterized his critically acclaimed Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece, Ashley Kahn tells the story of the genesis, creation, and aftermath of this classic recording. Featuring interviews with more than one hundred musicians, producers, friends, and family members; unpublished interviews with Coltrane and bassist Jimmy Garrison; and scores of never-before-seen photographs, A Love Supreme balances biography, cultural context, and musical analysis in a passionate and revealing portrait.

Callahan suggests that scholars have wrongly placed the sequence and therefore the importance of the works collectively known as the Johannine tradition - the Gospel of John and the Johannine Epistles. His proposal includes literary, theological, and historical analysis as he argues for the reevaluation of a significant part of the biblical canon.

Jazz on the Line: Improvisation in Practice presents an ethnographic reflection on improvisation as performance, examining how musicians think and act when negotiating improvisational frameworks. This multidisciplinary discussion—guided by a focus on recordings, composition, authenticity, and venues—explores the musical choices made by performers, emphasizing how these choices can be logically understood within the context of controlled, musical outputs. Throughout the text, the author engages directly with musicians and their varied practices—from canonized dogmas to innovative experimentalism—offering interviews both planned and spontaneous. Musical agency is posited as a tightrope balancing act, signifying the skill and excitement of improvisational performativity and exemplifying the life of a jazzaerialist. With a travel journal approach as a backdrop, Jazz on the Line provides concepts and theories that demystify the creative processes of improvisation.

In 1952, John Cage shocked audiences with 4'33," his composition showcasing the power of silence. From Cage's minimalism to Chris Burden's radical performance art two decades later, the post-war avant-garde sought to liberate the art world by shattering the divide between high and low art.Feast of Excess presents an engaging and accessible portrait of the cultural extremism that emerged in the United States after World War II. This "New Sensibility," as termed by Susan Sontag, was predicated upon excess, pushing and often crossing boundaries whether in the direction of minimalism ormaximalism. Through brief vignette profiles of prominent figures in literature, music, visual art, poetry, theater and journalism, George Cotkin leads readers on a focused journey through the interconnected stories of prominent figures such as Andy Warhol, Anne Sexton, John Cage, John Coltrane, BobDylan, Erica Jong, and Chris Burden, among many others, who broke barriers between artist and audience with their bold, shocking, and headline-grabbing performances.This inventive narrative captures the sentiment of liberation from high and low culture in artistic endeavors spanning from the 1950s to the 1970s and reveals the establishment of excess in American culture as the norm. A detailed emersion in the history of cultural extremism, Feast of Excess leavesreaders to consider the provocative revelation that the essence of excess remains in our culture today, for good and ill.

Watching Jazz: Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen is the first systematic study of jazz on screen media. Where earlier studies have focused almost entirely on the role and portrayal of jazz in Hollywood film, the present book engages with a plethora of technologies and media from early film and soundies through television to recent developments in digital technologies and online media. Likewise, the authors discuss jazz in the widest sense, ranging from Duke Ellington and Jimmy Dorsey through the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Charles Mingus to Pat Metheny. Much of this rich and fascinating material has never been studied in depth before, and what emerges most clearly are the manifold connections between the music and the media on which it was and is being recorded. Its long association with film and television has left its trace in jazz, just as online and social media are subtly shaping it now. Vice versa, visual media have always benefited from focusing on music and this significantly affected their development. The book follows these interrelations, showing how jazz was presented and represented on screen and what this tells us about the music, the people who made it and their audiences. The result is a new approach to jazz and the media, which will be required reading for students of both fields.

A married couple goes missing in 1995. After seven years they are presumed dead. It is 2018. Belay, a tormented worldly-wise employer of judges, apprises the Special Adjudicator, Ewald Wren, a black-letter law judge, that his short-term ruthless brand of justice is culpable. Wren impugns Belays competence. Belay retires Ewald and resolves to put him firmly in his place. Chase, an inimical and crime-writing uncle cuts in after the farewell bash. He believes Wren is the most likely culprit. He coerces Wren to survey all the locations and, mechanised by covert listening devices, to investigate all of those who may have been implicated. Otherwise, he will be ruined, imprisoned, or killed, or worse still his family will be forfeited. Left with no choice Wren accedes. Wren processes the evidence. He suspects further murders and ancillary attempts on lives. Glasson Dorcha, the most ruthless gangster in Glasgow seeks to avenge Wren for his jejune imprisonment and the murder of his grandfather by mutilating him. Wren learns life. Belay learns than extreme pain is plural. Wren and Chase are finally revealed as in-laws. Who will win? Will Belay, Wren, Chase, Glasson, the murderer or one of the suspects win?