Good books about music

Maybe I'm not grown up enough, but I can't get into music books about executives, A&R representatives, record companies, etc. I do remember appreciating Carlin's Wilson biography though.

I liked the Susan Hamilton one a lot too. Quite a character.

David Cantwell's critical bio of Hag.

^^just came in the mail!

The recent article in the New Yorker about Foley artists led me to The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 by Emily Thompson. It's not strictly about music but music runs through the fabric of the book as Thompson goes through some key achievements and developments in modern acoustics. There's a chapter on "Noise and Modern Culture" that gets into Russolo, Antheil, Varèse et al a bit. I'm only halfway through, looking forward to the chapter called "Electroacoustics and Modern Sound." It's not a dry read at all; Thompson's a terrific writer.

I'm wondering about that Suicide bio from 2015. "Dream Baby Dream: Suicide: A New York Story by Kris Needs

I'm fifty pages from the end of this. It has weirdly warped priorities - there's probably less than a page about the decade of Vega's adult life before becoming a visual artist and seeing Iggy, but there's at least a page of an interview with Rev giving a potted history of Charlie Parker and be-bop. I sometimes get the feeling that the writer is trying to reach a certain page count.
It's good at filling in the mystery about what exactly they were doing between 1970 and 1977 (playing many more shows than previously reported), and describing Rev's jazz roots (studying with Lennie Tristano and hanging out with Tony Williams) but despite having a lot of interview quotes from the two principals and most of the surrounding figures, I don't really feel like I've become closer to the source of the music. Needs would probably say you have to listen with a New York attitude.

There is another book on the band called No Compromise by David Nobakht which I thought was pretty decent. I haven't read the Needs one so can't compare.

have come across a few podcasts with Martin Rev telling the story of the band too.

The recent article in the New Yorker about Foley artists led me to The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 by Emily Thompson. It's not strictly about music but music runs through the fabric of the book as Thompson goes through some key achievements and developments in modern acoustics. There's a chapter on "Noise and Modern Culture" that gets into Russolo, Antheil, Varèse et al a bit. I'm only halfway through, looking forward to the chapter called "Electroacoustics and Modern Sound." It's not a dry read at all; Thompson's a terrific writer.

This sounds really interesting, and I might recommend one of my favorite music books of all time, Peter Doyle's Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900-1960, as a follow-up.

Sounds good to me too.

The DJ Screw book is really good but Who Got The Camera? is incredible, one of the best music books I've read in years. A must-read.

I really must get to this, having known Eric Harvey for some years.

xxp thanks, I'll chase down the Doyle book as well. Sounds (lol) like it's up my alley.

Maybe I'm not grown up enough, but I can't get into music books about executives, A&R representatives, record companies, etc. I do remember appreciating Carlin's Wilson biography though.

Yes?

There are various reasons which such books might be better than artist bios, but I can’t really type them right now, sorry.

The Bob Stanley book about pre-Rock Pop is pretty great so far. A lot of this stuff - Tin Pan Alley, musical theatre, cabaret - seldom gets discussed in music writing outside of Rock's "this is the lame shit we came to replace" origin mythos. Bonus that since it's Stanley, he gives attention to both US and UK pop; think a US author would probably not have given the UK a second glance, and I couldn't blame them really.

Thought this was maybe discussed here but can't find it, Paul Hanley's Leave the Capital: A History of Manchester Music in 13 Recordings is fantastic (so far).

https://www.amazon.com/Leave-Capital-History-Manchester-Recordings/dp/1901927717

Have not read that but read his fall book which completely ruled

Haven't read that but loved Steve Hanley's The Big Midweek.

Hanley bros podcast is pretty good too

Just pre-ordered this:

The Cricket: Black Music in Evolution, 1968–69
edited by A.B. Spellman, Larry Neal, and Amiri Baraka

$35.00
Ships out September 27, 2022.

Contributors include: A.B. Spellman, Imamu Ameer Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Larry Neal, Cecil Taylor, Milford Graves, Sun Ra, Ben Caldwell, Clyde Halisi, Don L. Lee (Haki R. Madhubuti), Duncan Barber, Gaston Neal, Hilary Broadus, James Stewart, Norman Jordan, Roger Riggins, Ronnie Gross, Stanley Crouch, Albert Ayler, Askia Muhammed Toure, Donald Stone, E. Hill, Haasan Oqwiendha Fum al Hut, Ibn Pori ‘det, Ishmael Reed, Joe Goncalves, Larry A. Miller (Katibu), Sonia Sanchez, Willie Kgositsile, Billy (Fundi) Abernathy, Dan Dawson and Black Unity Trio. Preface by A.B. Spellman. Introduction by David Grundy.

A rare document of the 1960s Black Arts Movement featuring Albert Ayler, Amiri Baraka, Milford Graves, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and many more, The Cricket fostered critical and political dialogue for Black musicians and writers. Edited by poets and writers Amiri Baraka, A.B. Spellman, and Larry Neal between 1968 and 1969 and published by Baraka’s New Jersey–based Jihad productions shortly after the time of the Newark Riots, this experimental music magazine ran poetry, position papers, and gossip alongside concert and record reviews and essays on music and politics. Over four mimeographed issues, The Cricket laid out an anticommercial ideology and took aim at the conservative jazz press, providing a space for critics, poets, and journalists (including Stanley Crouch, Haki Madhubuti, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez and Keorapetse Kgositsile) and a range of musicians, from Mtume to Black Unity Trio, to devise new styles of music writing. The publication emerged from the heart of a political movement—“a proto-ideology, akin to but younger than the Garveyite movement and the separatism of Elijah Mohammed,” as Spellman writes in the book’s preface—and aimed to reunite advanced art with its community, “to provide Black Music with a powerful historical and critical tool” and to enable avant-garde Black musicians and writers “to finally make a way for themselves.” This publication gathers all issues of the magazine with an introduction by poet and scholar David Grundy, who argues that The Cricket “attempted something that was in many ways entirely new: creating a form of music writing which united politics, poetry, and aesthetics as part of a broader movement for change; resisting the entire apparatus through which music is produced, received, appreciated, distributed, and written about in the Western world; going well beyond the tried-and-tested journalistic route of description, evaluation, and narration.”

Link to purchase

ooh that looks interesting

spellman still with us i'm pleased to see (as are ishmael reed and sonia sanchez)

Peter Doyle's Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900-1960,

Just bought this! Plus the Cantwell Haggard book.

The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 by Emily Thompson

Ordered this yesterday.

I wish I could chime in right now and say "I'm reading a Three Dog Night biography," but alas, I'm not.

Maybe you just watched the Playboy After Dark with them and James Brown. Close enough, I guess.

When I read Dave Weigel's book on prog, The Show That Never Ends, I was kind of amazed at how a major sub-theme was that Robert Fripp was a toxic nightmare of a person. What's amazing is that I've just about finished Sid Smith's In The Court Of King Crimson, a complete 50-year history of the band written by an avowed superfan, and that impression has only been strengthened! He really seems like the worst possible person to be in a band with. But the book is very well written and deals with every era more or less equally. (I hate the 80s albums, but this book almost convinced me to revisit them.)

Just read

Terry Teachout - Duke (very much not a good book about music)
Alex Ross - The Rest Is Noise (yes this was pretty good)

currently on

Ted Gioia - The History Of Jazz, 2nd Edition (just 100 pages in but already am having serious reservations about this)

If anyone can suggest some better books about early/mid 20th C music then please suggest. I already have Yeah Yeah Yeah / Before Elvis on the pile and am sure they will be an improvement.

I am one of the Teachout book's few defenders. I don't need him to convince me of Ellington's greatness, so I enjoyed the insights into his life and career.

Gioia is The Fucking Worst. The only person whose "history of jazz" I think I'd like less would probably be Scott Yanow.

Pete Tomsett's book Fifty Shades of Crimson dwells a fair amount on Fripp's relations with band members, though it's interesting that the only one who seemed to outright hate him was former friend Gordon Haskell, who also hated the music and lyrics he performed, and seems to have suffered from a lot of professional jealousy as well.

Read Paul Hanley's other Fall book, Have a Bleedin' Guess, which is also great. Now I'm reading Brix's autobiography, which isn't as good as those two, but I gotta get the whole picture.

Far too much stuff that's not about The Fall in Brix's.

gotta get the whole picture (about nigel kennedy)

unperson i think i quizzed you before abt a gioia book on jazz and you were non-committal -- did further reading harden yr attitude? (i know he's a knob online)

(i have a slim volume of essays by him reviewed in the wire before *i* was editor even -- i think by andy h4milton? -- which i think i skimmed at the time without taking offence but also without anything much impressing me; however we're talking like 1990 here lol so my memory is not reliable)

also is the weigel book worth reading? in principle i kind of like the idea of prog discussed from the perspective of a socially liberal libertarian who has a deep knowledge of day-to-day politics (if only bcz i want to see such a person exploring the complexities of why it's termed "progressive") (but evidently not so much that i got round to purchasing it)

unperson i think i quizzed you before abt a gioia book on jazz and you were non-committal -- did further reading harden yr attitude? (i know he's a knob online)

Yeah, honestly I've soured on him recently. I never paid that much attention to him in the past but the last few years he's struck me as a genuinely poor thinker, and far too reliant on some music-writing clichés which really bug me.

also is the weigel book worth reading? in principle i kind of like the idea of prog discussed from the perspective of a socially liberal libertarian who has a deep knowledge of day-to-day politics (if only bcz i want to see such a person exploring the complexities of why it's termed "progressive") (but evidently not so much that i got round to purchasing it)

Yeah, I liked it. He lays some interesting groundwork early on, talking about Liszt, Mussorgsky and Ravel, and his ultimate thesis (as I put it in my Wire review) "is that florid displays of virtuosity, and compositional complexity for its own sake, can be gestures of rebellion." It's very UK focused, with only a few continental European acts discussed, and Krautrock is not within the book's scope, but still, it's a relatively lightweight read that manages to convey a lot of information. When you consider that it's written by someone who doesn't spend their whole life writing about music, it's kind of amazingly well done. When political journalists offer opinions on culture, it usually makes me want to shove my head through the wall. Not true at all in this case.

The Weigel book was indeed very readable, but the political or social analysis struck me as being fairly general. You might want to try to dig up Paul Stump's The Music's All That Matters from 1998, where he writes about e.g. the differences between urban and provincial UK progressive artists; although he has some weird quirks of taste that made the book less than useful as a listening guide for me.

Teachout - you're right unperson, there was plenty in the way of fascinating detail through the book, however found myself muttering "fuck off Terry" every few pages which spoiled it for me.

Gioia - yeah knew this was bad as soon as I got to his bizarre summary of the blues, which was no more than a compilation of all the bullshit myths I've already had debunked by better books, and his refusal to discuss the ODJB or Paul Whiteman puts paid to any claims that it's comprehensive, however overall am finding it less annoying than Teachout as it's laying down this traditional narrative in a clear enough way that I'm appreciating more the better books on the subject I'd previously read.

yes i own (and long ago actually read) the stump book: it was mainly spoiled for me by his uncontrolled rage against a poorly delineated "post-modernism" in general and various nme writers in particular (who i had time for back then)

not that they shd be beyond criticism (so maybe i shd reread it, i'm quite likely more measured about and less patient with some of that stuff myself these days), but he never seemed to be landing accurately on anything they actually said, just furiously harumphing that they considered themselves too cool for his twiddly faves

his uncontrolled rage against a poorly delineated "post-modernism" in general and various nme writers in particular ...he never seemed to be landing accurately on anything they actually said, just furiously harumphing that they considered themselves too cool for his twiddly faves

Ah, I didn't realize Carducci's Disease had hopped the Atlantic.

The Bob Stanley pre-rock-pop book is so deliciously revelatory it probably deserves its own thread, but for now I’ll just say it keeps me running to YouTube to check out an old recording, or to Amazon to order an old CD. The quantity of music he must have listened to to write this is incredible.

You got an advance copy?

No, I think it has been officially published. Hasn’t it? I ordered it through the usual channels

Oh wait, I see, it's the ebook that isn't out yet.

It's been out in the UK for a couple of months and is as good as Josefa says.

I just came across a listing for Innovations in British jazz by John Wickes with a blurb from the people selling it which sounds interesting. Anybody come across it or even read it?
Seems to tie things in with various strands of prog and other improvisatory rock among other things. So sounds like something I want to read but thought I would see if anybody here is familiar with it.

Yes, it's a good and very thorough study of the British progressive jazz scene of the 60s and 70s. I've tended to dip in depending on my interest/current research rather than read cover to cover - although it has an overall chronological/thematic approach it's not really a narrative history. It's also a bit unwieldy with small print, so it's not the kind of thing I'd take to read on the bus as it were. As you say, it does a good job of tying progressive jazz with the prog and rock scenes. Maybe less strong on scenes outside London, but then that's a history that's still to be fully researched/written. Duncan Heining's Trad Dads, Dirty Boppers and Free Fusioneers covers some of the same territory, although is more rooted in the modern scene around Ronnie Scott et al. Both writers take a broadly Marxist approach, which is fine with me. They could both do with more feminist input though - Maggie Nicols' forthcoming memoir should help redress that balance.

Brix Smith’s book is interesting. I had forgotten how much of a West L.A. rich girl she was; there is overlap with stuff from the memoir from Cary Grant/Dyan Cannon’s daughter, as they both went to Crossroads in Santa Monica, and Rob Lowe was a mutual friend of theirs

For #NonfictionNovember a stack of my favorite 2022 music books. I’m partial to that one on top but you should read and buy all the great volumes here by @anniezaleski @carynrose @FrancescaRoyst1 @MarissaRMoss @johnlingan Greil Marcus and Bill C + Bobbie Malone 1/2 #musicbooks pic.twitter.com/F6NuXoVHnW

— The Running Kind: Listening to Merle Haggard (@dlcantwell) November 2, 2022

Recently read — or listened to, more accurately — “Major Labels” by Kelefa Sanneh. Enjoyed it a great deal more than I thought I would. He was nicely inclusive and open-minded, but not so much that the wind blows through. I gather he’s not rated ‘round these parts.

KId Congo's memoir was really good. Read it in 3 days, Some New Kind Of kick. Hope he writes some more even if not memoir. THink he was writing reviews and things for fanzines so wouldn't sneeze at him looking into his own aesthetics and music and stuff. Just reallly hope this isn't his sole published written work.