Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Music

Rockin' in the Ivory Tower takes a close look at two smaller universities, Drew in New Jersey and Stony Brook on Long Island, to see how the culture of rock music played an integral role in student life in the late 1960s.

Jean Beauvoir joined the Plasmatics in 1979, playing bass and keyboards for the most notorious band to emerge out of the New York City punk scene. By 1982, he was a member of Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul, a retro-rock revival act headed by Steven Van Zandt. The Disciples of Soul videos played on MTV during the network's earliest years, making Beauvoir one of the first Black recording artists to cross the start-up music channel's "color line".

In the early 1960s, the nation was on track to fulfill its destiny in what was being called "the American Century." Baby boomers and rock & roll shared the country's optimism and energy. For "one brief, shining moment" in the early 1960s, both President John F. Kennedy and young people across the country were riding high. The dream of a New Frontier would soon give way, however, to a new reality involving assassinations, the Vietnam War, Cold War crises, the civil rights movement, a new feminist movement, and various culture wars.

Keith Hatschek tells the story of three determined artists: Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and Iola Brubeck and the stand they took against segregation by writing and performing a jazz musical titled The Real Ambassadors. First conceived by the Brubecks in 1956, the musical's journey to the stage for its 1962 premiere tracks extraordinary twists and turns across the backdrop of the civil rights movement.

When the Nicholas Brothers danced, uptown at the Cotton Club, downtown at the Roxy, in segregated movie theatres in the South, and dance halls across the country, audiences cheered, clapped, stomped their feet, and shouted out uncontrollably. In Brotherhood in Rhythm, Constance Valis Hill interweaves an intimate portrait of these great performers with a rich, detailed history of jazz music and dance, both bringing their act to life and explaining their significance through a colorful analysis of their eloquent footwork, their full-bodied expressiveness, and their changing style.

Daphne A. Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to examine the critics, collectors, and listeners who have determined perceptions of Black women on stage and in the recording studio. How is it possible, she asks, that iconic artists such as Aretha Franklin and Beyonce exist simultaneously at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry? Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective on these acclaimed figures—a perspective informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women concerned with the work of their musical peers.

From Destiny's Child to Lemonade, Homecoming, and The Gift, Beyonce Knowles-Carter has redefined global stardom, feminism, Black representation, and celebrity activism. This book brings together new work from sixteen international scholars to explore Beyonce's impact as an artist and public figure from the perspectives of critical race studies, gender and women's studies, queer and cultural studies, music, and fan studies.

Music journalist Mike Barnes (MOJO, The Wire, Prog, and author of the acclaimed biography Captain Beefheart) goes back to the birth of progressive rock and surveys the cultural conditions and attitudes that fed into, and were in turn affected by, this remarkable musical phenomenon.

Bob Gruen is one of the most well-known and connected photographers in rock and roll. For almost 50 years, he has documented the music scene in pictures that have captured the world's attention. Right Place, Right Time is Gruen's first written account of his winding, adventure-filled journey.

Danny Goldberg's new book is a subjective history of 1967, the year he graduated from high school. It is, he writes, "an attempt at trying to remember the culture that mesmerized me, to visit the places and conversations I was not cool enough to have been a part of." It is also a refreshing and new analysis of the era; by looking at not only the political causes, but also the spiritual, musical, and psychedelic movements, Goldberg provides a unique perspective on how and why the legacy of 1967 lives on today.

For a Kentucky rifleman who spent his tour trudging through Vietnam's Central Highlands, it was Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'". For a "tunnel rat" who blew smoke into the Viet Cong's underground tunnels, it was Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze". For a black marine distraught over the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., it was Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools".

Rooted in rhythm-and-blues pioneered by black musicians, 1950s rock and roll was racially inclusive and attracted listeners and performers across the color line. In the 1960s, however, rock and roll gave way to rock: a new musical ideal regarded as more serious, more artistic-and the province of white musicians. Decoding the racial discourses that have distorted standard histories of rock music, Jack Hamilton underscores how ideas of "authenticity" have blinded us to rock's inextricably interracial artistic enterprise.

John Glatt tells the story of the Fillmores through the lives of Bill Graham, Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Carlos Santana, and an all-star supporting cast. Chronicling the East and West Coast cultures of the late 1960s and early 1970s-New York City with its speed, heroin, and the Velvet Underground versus San Francisco with the LSD-drenched Summer of Love - Glatt reveals how Graham made it all possible. But why did Graham shutter both Fillmores within weeks of each other in 1971, during the height of their popularity?

Written by his former assistant and with a foreword by Broadway legend Harold Prince, this audiobook celebrates Leonard Bernstein's centenary with an intimate and detailed look at the public and private life of the maestro.

Fifty years after he coined the iconic phrase "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee", Drew "Bundini" Brown remains one of boxing's most mysterious and misunderstood figures. His impact on the sport and the culture at large is undeniable. Cornerman and confidant to two of the greatest fighters ever - Sugar Ray Robinson and Muhammad Ali - Brown lived an extraordinary American life.

Sampling - incorporating found sound and manipulating it into another form entirely - has done more than any musical movement in the 20th century to maintain a continuum of popular music as a living document and, in the process, has become one of the most successful (and commercial) strains of postmodern art. Bring That Beat Back traces the development of this transformative pop-cultural practice from its origins in the turntable-manning, record-spinning hip-hop DJs of 1970s New York through 40 years of musical innovation and reinvention.

Patsy Cline, the beloved country singer, soared from obscurity to worldwide fame before her life tragically ended at age 30. After breaking all the barriers in the Nashville boys' club of the music business in the 1950s, she brought the Nashville sound to the nation with her torch ballads and rockabilly tunes like "Walking After Midnight," "Crazy," and "I Fall to Pieces."

In this new edition of his Very Short Introduction title, Philip Bohlman considers questions of meaning and technology in world music and responds to the dramatically changing political world in which people produce and listen to world music. He also addresses the different ways in which world music is created, disseminated, and consumed, as the full reach of the internet and technologies that store and spread music through the exchange of data files spark a revolution in the production and availability of world music.

Long before the United States had presidents from the world of movies and reality TV, we had scores of politicians with connections to country music. In I'd Fight the World, Peter La Chapelle traces the deep bonds between country music and politics. These performers and politicians both rode and resisted cultural waves: some advocated for the poor and dispossessed, and others voiced religious and racial anger, but they all walked the line between exploiting their celebrity and righteously taking on the world.

In Move On Up, Aaron Cohen tells the remarkable story of the explosion of soul music in Chicago. Record producers and songwriters broadcast optimism for black America's future through their sophisticated, jazz-inspired productions for the Dells and many others. Musicians like Phil Cohran and the Pharaohs used their music to voice Afrocentric philosophies that challenged racism and segregation, while Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire and Chaka Khan created music that inspired black consciousness.