Living With Music

Before Ralph Ellison became one of America’s greatest writers, he was a musician and a student of jazz, writing widely on his favorite music for more than fifty years. Now, jazz authority Robert O’Meally has collected the very best of Ellison’s inspired, exuberant jazz writings in this unique anthology.

This book is Nick Carter’s autobiography and self-help hybrid in which he chronicles his struggles with a dysfunctional family and the unimaginable rigors of becoming an internationally successful pop-star at the age of 12. From his battle with addiction to serious health complications and the pain of his younger sister’s tragic death, Nick leaves nothing to the imagination and offers true and heartfelt advice to help readers overcome obstacles in their own lives.

Drawing on recent ideas that explore new environments and the changing situations of composition and performance, Simon Emmerson provides a significant contribution to the study of contemporary music, bridging history, aesthetics and the ideas behind evolving performance practices. Whether created in a studio or performed on stage, how does electronic music reflect what is live and living? What is it to perform 'live' in the age of the laptop? Many performer-composers draw upon a 'library' of materials but others refuse to abandon traditionally 'created and structured' electroacoustic work. Lying behind this maelstrom of activity is the perennial relationship to 'theory', that is, ideas, principles and practices that somehow lie behind composers' and performers' actions. The relationship of the body performing to the spaces around has also undergone a revolution as the source of sound production has shifted to the loudspeaker. Emmerson considers these issues in the framework of our increasingly 'acousmatic' world in which we cannot see the source of the sounds we hear.

O'Meally has collected the very best of Ellison's writings on this subject - each selection vibrant, insightful, and bursting with Ellison's love of the music - in this unique and original anthology."--BOOK JACKET.

The #1 New York Times Bestseller * Named one of Variety's Best Music Books of 2021 * Included in Audible's Best of The Year list * A Business Insider Best Memoirs of 2021 * One of NME's Best Music Books of 2021 So, I've written a book. Having entertained the idea for years, and even offered a few questionable opportunities ("It's a piece of cake! Just do 4 hours of interviews, find someone else to write it, put your face on the cover, and voila!") I have decided to write these stories just as I have always done, in my own hand. The joy that I have felt from chronicling these tales is not unlike listening back to a song that I've recorded and can't wait to share with the world, or reading a primitive journal entry from a stained notebook, or even hearing my voice bounce between the Kiss posters on my wall as a child. This certainly doesn't mean that I'm quitting my day job, but it does give me a place to shed a little light on what it's like to be a kid from Springfield, Virginia, walking through life while living out the crazy dreams I had as young musician. From hitting the road with Scream at 18 years old, to my time in Nirvana and the Foo Fighters, jamming with Iggy Pop or playing at the Academy Awards or dancing with AC/DC and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, drumming for Tom Petty or meeting Sir Paul McCartney at Royal Albert Hall, bedtime stories with Joan Jett or a chance meeting with Little Richard, to flying halfway around the world for one epic night with my daughters…the list goes on. I look forward to focusing the lens through which I see these memories a little sharper for you with much excitement.

An ethnography about local working musicians in Brazil's "most African" city Living from Music in Salvador examines the labor of musicians in Salvador da Bahia, widely regarded as Brazil's most African city. Drawing on fieldwork that spans over sixteen years, the book explores local musicians' lives as members of a flexible work force, emphasizing questions of race, social class, and cultural politics in relation to professional music making. From clubs and restaurants, to Carnaval parades and festival celebrations, to concert stages and recordings, the abiliy of musicians to earn a living wage is contingent on their navigating industry and societal conditions that are profoundly informed by the entrenched legacies of colonization and slavery.

This book turns out to have a scientific relevance and value that will similarly interest many, not only those in the specialized field of neuroscience but very individual who has a brain and a mind and wonders about them.

In 2001, Jace Clayton was an amateur DJ who recorded a three-turntable, sixty-minute mix called Gold Teeth Thiefand put it online to share with his friends. Within months, the mix became an international calling card, whisking Clayton away to a sprawling, multitiered nightclub in Zagreb, a tiny gallery in Osaka, a former brothel in São Paolo, and the atrium of MoMA. And just as the music world made its fitful, uncertain transition from analog to digital, Clayton found himself on the front lines of an education in the creative upheavals of art production in the twenty-first-century globalized world. Uproot is a guided tour of this newly opened cultural space, mapped with both his own experiences and his relationships with other industry game-changers such as M.I.A. and Pirate Bay. With humor, insight, and expertise, Clayton illuminates the connections between a Congolese hotel band and the indie rock scene, Mexican surfers and Israeli techno, Japanese record collectors and hidden rain-forest treasure, and offers an unparalleled understanding of music in a digital age. Uproot takes readers behind the turntable decks to tell a story that only a DJ--and writer--of this caliber can tell.