[Cross-posted from New Books in Pop Music] Scholars commonly trace the rise of the punk rock movement of the mid-1970s to two cities and two bands, New York’s Ramones and London’s The Sex Pistols. In Spray Paint the Walls: The Black Flag Story (Omnibus, 2010), however, journalist Stevie Chick convincingly argues that Black Flag, and Los Angeles, the city that that spawned the seminal group, deserve a place alongside these more storied locales and bands. Chick, who interviewed everyone from early fans to former band members for this engaging book, skillfully traces Black Flag’s development from its suburban garage-band beginnings through its popular peak in the early 1980s, when the Los Angeles Police Department regularly sent officers outfitted in riot gear to disrupt Black Flag’s tumultuous performances and to undermine the growing power of the city’s – and the nation’s – punk movement. Still, as Chick shows, a band whose members at times seemed willing to go to war with everyone and everything surrounding them ultimately fought their most intense battles within their own ranks.

Stevie Chick is a London-based author, journalist, sub-editor and lecturer. He’s written for such storied publications as The Guardian, Melody Maker, Mojo, NME and Rolling Stone, and is the author of three books: Spray Paint The Walls: The Black Flag Story, Ninja Tune: 20 Years Of Beats & Pieces, and Psychic Confusion: The Sonic Youth Story. He can be reached through his blog or through his Facebook page.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Pop Music] After his incendiary performance at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, Jimi Hendrix almost immediately went from obscure musician to pop superstar in America. But as Steven Roby and Brad Schreiber reveal in Becoming Jimi Hendrix: From Southern Crossroads to Psychedelic London, the Untold Story of a Musical Genius, Hendrix was far from an overnight sensation. Drawing on an impressive research base, the authors have unearthed the early 1960s prehistory of Hendrix’s well-known but all-too-short life in the spotlight. They show that before his artistic and cultural breakthrough Hendrix had worked as a guitar-playing sideman for some of the biggest R & B acts of the 1960s, including Ike and Tina Turner, the Isley Brothers, and the incomparable Little Richard. In doing so, they paint a vivid and compelling portrait of a massively influential musician whose genius did not suddenly emerge after he formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1966, but rather evolved during endless nights of gigging in backwater juke joints and dive bars from Nashville to New York City.

Steven Roby is a San Francisco-based photographer and the author of three books on the life and legacy of Jimi Hendrix: Black Gold: The Lost Archives of Jimi Hendrix, Becoming Jimi Hendrix: From Southern Crossroads to Psychedelic London, the Untold Story of a Musical Genius, and his latest, Hendrix on Hendrix: Interviews and Encounters with Jimi Hendrix. He can be reached through his blog.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Science, Technology, and Society] In The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910 (MIT Press, 2013), Alexandra Hui explores a fascinating chapter of that history in a period when musical aesthetics and natural science came together in the psychophysical study of sound in nineteenth century Germany. Though we tend to consider the performing arts and sciences as occupying different epistemic and disciplinary realms, Hui argues that the scientific study of sound sensation not only was framed in terms of musical aesthetics, but became increasingly so over time. The book traces a series of arguments by practitioners of the study of sound sensation as they sought to uncover universal rules for understanding the sonic world: How much epistemic weight ought to be placed on the experiences of an individual listener? What sorts of expertise were relevant or necessary for a sound scientist’s experimental practice? Did musical training matter? Was there a proper way to listen to music? The Psychophysical Ear follows sound scientists as they grappled with these and other questions, struggling with the consequences of understanding the act of listening as a practice that was fundamentally grounded in particular historical contexts as phonographic technology and the increasing number of performances of non-Western music in Europe were transforming the sonic world of Europe. Hui’s story often involves the reader’s own sensorium in the story, urging us to imagine or play sequences of musical notes that prove crucial to some of the arguments of the actors in the story. Enjoy!

[Cross-posted from New Books in Pop Music] Extreme metal, punk, and hardcore. Slayer. Sick of it All. Cro-Mags. Decapitated. Behemoth. Musically aggressive rock bands with growling vocals and lyrics about annihilation, death, and dismemberment. A genre of music that, even more than more mainstream music genres, seems to be the province of (straight) white males. But wait. In What are You Doing Here?: A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal (Bazillion Points, 2012), Laina Dawes examines an overlooked and numerically small segment of the extreme music scene: black women. Putting her sociological training to good use, Dawes presents a macro structural cultural analysis of race in North America (Dawes is Canadian) and how this plays out in the micro-arenas of high school community and heavy metal shows. Using in-depth interviews with a number of black women punk and metal artists including Skin, Sandra St. Victor, Militia Vox, Diamond Rowe, Urith Myree, Tamar-Kali, Ashley Greenwood, Yvonne Ducksworth, Camille Douglas, Alexis Brown, and others, Dawes highlights the self and societal contradictions of being black, female, and a fan of extreme music. Most significantly, the black friends of these women accuse them of not being black enough and their white metal friends (and strangers, for that matter) are dumbfounded about what a black woman might find interesting in this world of white males. The answer to both, writes Dawes, is easy: Metal fandom allows these women to be themselves, to be individuals, to escape the narrow confines of prescribed gender and race roles in North American society.

Laina Dawes is a music and cultural critic and opinion writer, an active public speaker, and a contributor to CBC Radio. She is also a current affairs columnist for Afrotoronto.com and contributing editor for Blogher.com.

[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] Erica Fox Brindley’s recent book explores the centrality of music to early Chinese thought. Making broad use of both received and newly excavated texts, Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China (SUNY Press, 2012) offers readers a history of harmony in early China. Brindley shows how the concept was integral to integrating what might otherwise be considered disparate areas – music, the body, and the cosmos – into a system that had ramifications for politics, ethics, and health. Pt. I of the book focuses on the connection between music and the state. Crucially, music was not just reflective of state health in early China, but could causally influence the health of the state and the cosmos. It was treated as a civilizing tool and a mode of cultural unification. Pt. II looks at relationships between music, politics, and religion, paying special attention to how music influenced the emotional, moral, and physical health of individuals. The concept of “music” here is expansive, incorporating many aspects of sound and the sonic. It is a wonderfully thoughtful work that contributes to a number of fields in redirecting our collective attention to the sensorium of early China and its impact on the textual archive.

[Cross-posted from New Books in World Music] Have you seen North Indian vocalists improvise? Their hands and voices move together to trace intricate melodic patterns.  If we think that music is just made of sequences of notes, then this motion may seem quite puzzling at first.  But the physical motion of singers reveal that there is much more going on than note combinations: spiraling, swooping, twirling–even moments of exquisite stillness in which time seems to stop.  This kinetic aspect of melodic action is the topic of Matt Rahaim’s new book, Musicking Bodies: Gesture and Voice in Hindustani Music (Wesleyan University Press, 2012). Rahaim first traces a history of ideas about moving and singing in Indian music, from Sanskrit treatises to courtesan dance performance to the 20th century boom in phonograph recordings. He then leads the reader through vivid melodic and gestural worlds of ragas with illuminating and concise analyses of video data and interviews from years of training in North Indian vocal music, and suggests ways in which melodic motion serves as a vehicle for traditions of ethical virtue. In this interview, Rahaim discusses the bodily disciplines of gesture, posture, and voice production that are so fundamental to singing.  Enjoy!

[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] The name of the group is deceptively simple: Samul (“four objects”) + Nori (“folk entertainment”) = SamulNori. Nathan Hesselink’s new book traces the transformations of this complex contemporary Korean drumming ensemble from its first concert in a cramped Seoul basement in 1978 through the 1990s, by which time they had become a prominent media presence in Korea and abroad. Framing the story within the larger discourse of Pŏpko ch’angshin (preserving the old while creating the new), SamulNori: Contemporary Korean Drumming and the Rebirth of Itinerant Performance Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2012) introduces readers and listeners to the wider history of Korean percussion music. Hesselink locates the roots of SamulNori in itinerant performance culture in Korea, focusing in particular on the namsadang wandering minstrels and their acrobatics, puppetry, and other performing arts in what reads as a wonderful contribution to the broader history of movement and itinerancy in world history. (Fans of the film The King and the Clown [Wang ui namja, 2005] will recognize this category of namsadang performers!) A CD is included with the book, allowing readers to listen in on some of the major SamulNori works in Hesselink’s account. (My particular favorites were the songs produced by the collaboration between SamulNori and the Euro-American jazz quartet Red Sun.) Readers who are already acquainted with traditional Korean percussion will find much of interest in this history, and others will find a new world of music to explore.  Enjoy!

[Cross-posted from New Books in Jazz]

Feed: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?”

Comic:  “Practice!”

When I first began to build a jazz record library back in the early 1960s, one particular album stood out.  A rare “double-album,” Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert was more akin in appearance to the records in my parents’ classical record collection.  The back stories and analyses of the concert, the marketing of the recording 12 years later in 1950, and the subsequent canonization of the concert and recording is the story Catherine Tackley tells in her new book for the Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz Series, Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert (Oxford University Press, 2011)

Tackley is an extremely busy and talented woman.  An academic, musician, writer, teacher, and performer, she adores both the study of and playing jazz.  She played Goodman’s songs herself with her big band Dr. Jazz and the Cheshire cats “in a room full of the world’s leading jazz scholars.”  Now that’s academic courage!

Benny Goodman, billed the “King of Swing,” was uneasy about the longevity of the label; a perfectionist and an artful player of both jazz and classical music, he feared that he’d be typecast.  His Carnegie Hall concert was “sold” by promoters at the time as an important event in the history of the evolution of jazz in general and swing in particular.

Nonetheless, Tackley recounts how Carnegie Hall had been the site of both classical and popular music, with “crossover” antecedents to “jazz” concerts going back as far as 1912 when an integrated audience attended the Clef Club orchestra consisting of all black musicians who “played a program of traditional spirituals and compositions by black composers.”  And there were others, including Paul Whiteman’s orchestra and W.C. Handy featuring Fats Waller, all of whom played at Carnegie Hall before Goodman.

Goodman and his band were already well known to the public due to his many live, nationally broadcast radio programs.  Tackley uses a musician’s and historian’s approach in analyzing the subtle differences in the arrangements and performances on the January 16, 1938 program.  She also tells interesting anecdotes about drummer Gene Krupa, trumpeter Harry James, vibe-player Lionel Hampton, pianist Jess Stacey and many others.  Members of Duke Ellington’s  and Count Basie’s bands also participated in the jam session that night, too.  Ironically, for the musicians who played that evening, it might have been just another working night.  After the concert many of the musicians went to the Savoy Ballroom to hear a battle of two other famous bands –Count Basie and Billie Holiday dueling it out with Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald!

Finally, the author tells the story of the concert’s own creation myth when 12 years later, in 1950, the acetates from the concert were “found” and subsequently  marketed by Columbia Records.  Goodman, the critics, and the producers at Columbia thought the release might revive swing.  Jazz and Goodman had long moved on to other forms, but the concert on January 16, 1938 became part of jazz history nonetheless.  Tackley’s story of the concert, the individual song performances, the critical and audience responses, and the later marketing of the recording  gives the reader a fascinating glimpse at how the music that night became part of jazz’s and America’s cultural legacy.

On a personal note, my wonderful father-in-law, who passed away in February, 2013, was a WWII veteran who adored big bands and the music of Benny Goodman.  I met Farris Sadak the first time when he and his wife Gamile were listening to a jazz quartet at the Ice House in Herndon, Virginia, in 1982.  Two of his friends were members of the quartet: one, Smitty, another WWII veteran, played clarinet; the other, drummer Brooks Tegler, patterned himself after Gene Krupa.  Nothing made my father-in-law happier and more nostalgic than tapping his foot whenever he heard sounds of the swing era.  It was part of his history, his life as a young man, as it was for so many of his generation that is quickly passing from the American landscape.   I can’t listen to the music without thinking of him.  The music transcends generations; and it connects us to the people we love and loved even if we didn’t share the time and place and experiences that they did.   Little did I know when I first listened to the recording of that famous concert in my early teens what richness, insight, and joy of human connections I would get from the music of jazz.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Pop Music] Who is Motown’s first real star? The answer, of course, is Mary Wells, singer of such classics as “My Guy,” “Bye Bye Baby,” “The One Who Really Loves You,” “You Beat Me to the Punch,” and “Two Lovers,” among others. All of these hits were released in just four years between 1960 and 1969. In Mary Wells: The Tumultuous Life of Motown’s First Superstar (Chicago Review Press, 2012) author Peter Benjaminson chronicles the life of this singular performer from her early days as a young rock ‘n’ roll diva to her last years struggling with cancer. Along the way we learn that Wells was a tireless performer. She never stopped touring, never stopped reaching for the brass ring of financial success that eluded her for much of her career. It seems she never did receive the money she felt she deserved for the songs she released for Motown, while the record company appeared to rake in a handsome profit. She left Motown in 1964, released records with a number of different labels over the next twenty-six years, and finally received a paltry $100,000 from a law suit she filed against Motown in the late eighties. Whatever the case, Benjaminson shows well how Mary Wells star still shines bright. Her songs are known by most everyone, they are ingrained in the American popular psyche.

Peter Benjaminson is the author of The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard, The Story of Motown, and co-author of Investigative Reporting. He has written numerous articles for the Detroit Free Press and Atlanta Journal-Constitution among others.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Pop Music] Disclosure: I am a Meathead, an avid fan of Meat Puppets. I have been since 1986 when I first heard their version of “Good Golly Miss Molly” from Out My Way. I’m even writing a book about the band. The problem, however, has always been lack of secondary data. There are no books detailing the career of this seminal punk/indie/alternative/psychedelic/country trio, until now. In Too High to Die: Meet the Meat Puppets (Lulu, 2012) Greg Prato offers up an exhaustive history of the band’s thirty-plus years of music making. As an oral history he includes stories from all three original band members, plus most of the band’s other members, past and present. He also includes interviews with many people familiar with the band: childhood friends, girlfriends, fellow musicians, label executives, managers, etc. The collection of stories is convincing. They trace the path of a band that has consistently defied categorization, always stuck to their artistic guns, battled the inner-demons that seem to haunt too many great artists, and in the twenty-first century, in their fourth decade as a band, come out on top of their game. Other than listening to Meat Puppets’ music (which is what y’all should do), reading Too High to Die is a great place to begin your path to becoming a Meathead.

Greg Prato is a writer and author whose work appears regularly in Rolling Stone. He is the author of several books including Grunge is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music, MTV Ruled the World: The Early Years of Music Video and, most recently, Dynasty: The Oral History of the New York Islanders, 1972-1984.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Pop Music] “A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop, a-lop-bam-boom!” And so rock and roll was born. And so American culture changed forever. So says David Kirby in Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll (Continuum, 2009). “Tutti Frutti,” Little Richard’s first hit, recorded by Robert “Bumps” Blackwell at Cosimo Matassa’s J & M Studio in New Orleans in September 1955, co-written and sanitized by Dorothy LaBostrie after Richard’s original lyric (“A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop, a-good-goddamn/Tutti Frutti, good booty”) was deemed a bit too racy for a recorded release (it was, after all, a song about anal copulation, writes the author), is the lynchpin around which Kirby builds a biography of one of the greats of twentieth-century American music and art. His story moves from Richard’s childhood in Macon, Georgia, to his place among the greats of the old, weird America, to his legacy as the Architect of Rock. It’s Kirby’s contention, really, that Richard’s story is America’s story. It’s filled with entrepreneurs, con artists, straights, gays, gospels, devils, showmen and, best of all, outrageous and booty shakin’ music, and Little Richard Penniman, in a more than fifty-year career, embraces all of these and more with abandon.

David Kirby is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. He has written on music for the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and others.

[Crossposted from New Books in Theater] 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 his work. Theater is an art that requires attendance. Unlike reading a book or renting a movie, there really are only a certain number of people that actually saw the original production of “Pippin” or “On the Town.” Either you were there or you weren’t. Experience, in theater, can’t be replicated by Netflix or a library card.

[Crossposted from New Books in Popular Music] 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.

[Crossposted from New Books in History] 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 Morrisonoffers an excellent example and analysis of the dilemmas Soviet artists faced. When Prokofiev came back to the Soviet Union in 1935, he was asked to accommodate his work to the “needs of the Party.” He did so and became a Party darling. But then things changed. Stalin–an expert in all things–decided that Prokofiev’s work was too “formal” (whatever that meant). And so he was out of favor, and remained so for the rest of his life. When he died–ironically on the same day as Stalin–his passing was hardly noticed. It’s a sad and instructive story, and we should all thank Simon Morrison for telling it.Please become a fan of “New Books in Music” on Facebook if you haven’t already.