Showing results by publisher "Tantor Media" in Entertainment & Celebrities

In his time, the Austrian American composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) was an international icon. His twelve-tone system was considered the future of music itself. Today, however, leading orchestras rarely play his works, and his name is met with apathy, if not antipathy. With this interpretative account, the acclaimed biographer of Toscanini finally restores Schoenberg to his rightful place in the canon, revealing him as one of the twentieth century's most influential composers and teachers.

With era-defining number ones like 'I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)' and 'Reach Out I'll Be There' came stardom and also a more enduring reward: the love of four men who become tighter than brothers. Together they comprise one of the most celebrated R&B groups of all time. But remarkable musical success didn't spare Fakir the pain of marital distress, soured investment deals, struggles with sobriety, and the sudden loss of his brothers, all of which he covers in this confessional, unmissable book.

Tom Doyle takes listeners through the ride of a lifetime, from Starr's brushes with death as a child brought up in poverty, through to dizzying heights of fame and success with the Beatles and beyond. By examining pivotal moments, anecdotes, and cautionary tales, we see Starr soar as part of the biggest band in the world—and then try to cope with life outside of it with a film career, misadventures with friends, children's TV narration, furniture designing, and marriage to a Bond girl, before eventually finding peace and sobriety.

Thirty years after Rent, Jonathan Larson's groundbreaking rock opera, opened on Broadway, you would be hard-pressed to find a musical theater fan who doesn't know at least some of the show’s iconic tunes by heart. Much of the impact comes from the show's musical style, a singular blend of grunge rock, power pop, gospel, and R & B that was brought to life by the show's onstage band, headed by the legendary musical director Tim Weil.

Jazz legend Cootie Williams left home to start his career as a professional musician at the age of fifteen. In 1940, after eleven years as one of the major soloists with the Duke Ellington orchestra, Williams was lured away to the band of Benny Goodman, one of the most popular bands in the country. At the time, it was a controversial move―it was still taboo for African Americans to share the bandstand with white people.

While other kids were enjoying the head-bashing pleasures of tackle football, a freshly bar mitzvahed Steven Blier was inhaling operas and getting his first taste of accompanying professional singers. Beginning with impromptu piano gigs in the 1960s, Blier ascended to a dazzling career as an accompanist, teacher, and producer that has taken him to the highest reaches of artistic achievement. Today, Blier has partnered many of the brightest stars in music and thousands have fallen in love with his work via his acclaimed New York Festival of Song.

On December 15, 1985, powerful mafia don Carlos Marcello, referring to JFK's death, told a fellow Texas prison inmate, in part, that, "Yeah, I had the son of a bitch killed." This changes everything about not only the president's assassination but also reveals Marcello's complicity in the deaths...

Marilyn Monroe has been gone for over sixty years, and yet people are still talking about her. What, exactly, is the spell she casts on so many? Stunning, exciting to watch, incredibly famous, Monroe lived a very public life and died young, with a sad suddenness. All of this is true, and yet there is so much more to her story. On Marilyn Monroe: An Opinionated Guide looks past the sensation to the real legacy—her richly varied body of work.

When blues master Robert Johnson's recordings were rereleased to great fanfare in the 1960s, little was known about his life, giving rise to legends that he gained success by selling his soul to the devil. Biography of a Phantom is musicologist Mack McCormick's search, from the late 1960s until McCormick's death in 2015, to uncover Johnson's life story. McCormick spent decades reconstructing Johnson's mysterious life and developing theories about his untimely death at the age of 27, but never made public his discoveries. Biography of a Phantom publishes his compelling work for the first time.

Mel Brooks, born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, is one of the great comic voices of the twentieth century. Having won almost every entertainment award there is, Brooks has straddled the line between outsider and insider, obedient and rebellious, throughout his career, making out-of-bounds comedy the American mainstream. Jeremy Dauber argues that throughout Brooks's extensive body of work, the comedian has seen the most success when he found a balance between his manic energy and the constraints imposed by comedic partners, the Hollywood system, and American cultural mores.

In Roadhouse Blues, Bob Batchelor presents an epic tale of one of rock's (and America's) most significant periods, as the "Age of Aquarius" gave way to a new age of mayhem, presidential misdeeds, and murder. Batchelor combines cultural history, musical and lyrical analysis, and a broad stroke of pop-culture mythos to give fresh perspective on a pivotal time. Candid, authoritative, and utterly absorbing, Roadhouse Blues is a biography of a man, a band, and an era that set the tone for the contemporary world.

The world loves Sheriff Andy Taylor. Yet the actor who played him was intensely private. Here, for the first time, is the real Andy Griffith, his career and life defined by the island that made him in the years soon after World War II. He achieved his artistic breakthrough while acting in The Lost Colony drama on Roanoke Island, then spent the rest of his life repaying the island for giving him that start. Here, in unique closeup, is Andy of Manteo, reveling in wild, watery and loving ways with his fellow islanders.

When a young screenwriter goes online to check out the promotional website for a new poker movie called Rounders, he's shocked to discover how similar it is to a screenplay he wrote a few years earlier. Against all odds, he proceeds to take on Miramax and the Hollywood system with the help of an ingenious lawyer. Jeffrey Grosso simply has to prove how it could have happened and convince a judicial system that often favors studios over writers that he's a victim of intellectual property theft, which results in a ten-year landmark legal battle against Hollywood's most notorious studio.

In 1985, Mark Bryan heard Darius Rucker singing in a dorm shower at the University of South Carolina and asked him to form a band. For the next eight years, Hootie & the Blowfish-completed by bassist Dean Felber and drummer Soni Sonefeld-played every frat house, roadhouse, and rock club in the mid-Atlantic and Southeast, becoming one of the biggest independent acts in the region.

Carol Cash Large, longtime friend of Blake Shelton, helped move the award-winning musician to Nashville just two weeks after he graduated high school at the tender age of seventeen and has been with him every step of the way since. In Blake Shelton: Happy Anywhere, she takes you backstage for personal and unique insight into the life of the young singer. From Shelton's work with producer Bobby Braddock, recording his number one song "Austin," and performing on the Grand Ole Opry to his record-breaking seventeen consecutive number one songs and beyond, she has been right there.

This is the first full-length biography of this mid-twentieth century multi-faceted star. One of the central tensions of Dale's life revolved around chasing the elusive work/family balance, making her story instantly relatable to women today. In addition to fame, Dale longed for a happy, stable, family life. Her roles of wife and mother became the foundation for her public persona: the smart, smiling, cheerful cowgirl. Unusual for the time were Dale Evans's attempts to control the trajectory of her career at a time when men dominated decision-making in the entertainment fields.

Despite the ups and downs of his personal life and professional career—even in the face of deafness—Beethoven remained remarkably consistent in his most basic convictions about his art. This inner consistency, writes the music historian Mark Evan Bonds, provides the key to understanding the composer's life and works. Discarding tired myths about the composer, Bonds proposes a new way of listening to Beethoven by hearing his music as an expression of his entire self, not just his scowling self.

What might we dare to expect from an actor's autobiography, even one from a star as personable as George Sanders? In the case of Memoirs of a Professional Cad, we possibly get more than we deserve. George Sanders undoubtedly led a colorful, glamorous, and even action-packed life, spanning the peak years of Hollywood's golden age. But the greatest joy of his memoirs is how funny they are and how penetrating their author's wit.

Much has been written about Don Knotts's career, especially about his iconic role as Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show, but personal views into the man himself are few and far between. In Tied Up in Knotts, a loving daughter provides a full-life narrative of her father: Don's difficult childhood in an abusive home, his escape into comedic performance, becoming a household name, his growth as a feature film actor, his failing health, and his family life throughout, leading to touching and hilarious moments that will make the listener laugh and cry.

Col. Bruce Hampton was a charismatic musical figure who launched and continued to influence the jam band genre over his 50-plus years performing. Part bandleader, soul singer, storyteller, conjuror, poet, preacher, comedian, philosopher, and trickster, Col. Bruce actively sought out and dealt in the weird, wild underbelly of the American South.