New Books in Music

In 2004, the traditionally Polish-Catholic community of Hamtramck Michigan became the site of a debate over the Muslim call to prayer. Members of the Hamtramck community engaged in a contest about the appropriateness of sound and its intrusion into public space. In Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism (NYU Press, 2014), this example is one of three cases that Isaac Weiner studies in order to investigate the role of sound in the American religious public sphere. Weiner, Assistant Professor of Religion and Culture in the Department of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University, offers a rich and eminently readable account of how sound matters to religion in public life. We learn that debates over noise have a long history in the American religious landscape. These debates change as the constitution of American religious life changes, and as jurisprudence opens new questions about the nature of religion and its expressions. In our conversation, Professor Weiner and I discuss this history, how he came upon it, and what it can teach us about the future of American religious pluralism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

The New York-based rock band Living Colour exploded into national consciousness in 1988 after their video for the thunderous “Cult of Personality” went into heavy rotation on MTV. Their album, Vivid, broke into the Billboard Top Ten and sold more than two million copies. A worldwide tour followed, which included Los Angeles dates opening for the Rolling Stones and Guns and Roses. In subsequent years, the band enjoyed moderate success before breaking up for the first time in 1995. At first glance, the above account makes Living Colour sound like scores of other hard rock bands who enjoyed a period of broad popularity in the 1980s. But as Mark Prado ably demonstrates inLiving Colour: Beyond the Cult of Personality(CreateSpace, 2014), Living Colour was no run of the mill rock act. The band was the first all-black rock group to enjoy massive commercial success since Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys. The members of Living Colour were also fiercely political and spoke out regularly about issues of race and power in American life, which as Mark and I discuss, may have blunted the band’s commercial success. Mark Prado is an award-winning reporter for the Marin Independent-Journal. He attended his first Living Colour concert in 1989 and has documented the band ever since. Readers can contact him at markprado2323@yahoo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

In Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea (University of California Press, 2013), Nicholas Harkness explores the human voice as an instrument, and object, and an emblem in a rich ethnography of songak in Christian South Korea. In Songs of Seoul, the voice is deeply embodied. It is also shaped by an aesthetics of progress, as songak singers cultivate a “clean” voice that becomes an emblem for that progress in terms of Christian and national advancement. Part 1 of the book introduces readers to the vocal practices enacted by songak singers to cultivate clean voices, situating these practices in the histories and spaces from which they emerge and considering the relationship between singing and evangelism in modern Korea. Part 2 considers the voice as a nexus of social relations, considering how singers navigate between church and university, home and abroad, peers and superiors. It analyzes the (simultaneously public and intimate) ritual performances of songak singing, paying special attention to the role of singing in creating affective bonds among members of Christian Korean communities. Harkness’s book is an inspiring, thoughtful ethnography that contributes to a wide range of fields, and will be of special interest to anyone who enjoys reading about modern Korea, sound studies, music history, religion, and performance studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

It is a challenge for all musicians to find success in the modern music industry, but women face unique challenges. Cultural narratives shape how female artists get sold to the public and those narratives, in turn, affect how the public consumes the music of these women artists. Kristin Lieb examines the business decisions that shape the careers of female pop artists. Her book, Gender, Branding and the Modern Music Industry (Routledge, 2013),explores this terrain and develops a lifecycle model for female artists. This model describes how many female artists enter pop music as “good girls” only later to become “temptresses,” which then can transform into a range of possible branding options from “divas” and “exotics” to “whores” and “hot messes.” Lieb developed this model by interviewing the business managers, marketers, and agents who are shaping how artists get branded and marketed. In the interview, Lieb applies this model to a wide range of artists from Miley Cyrus and Lorde to Adele and Madonna. She offers tremendous insight about how behind the scenes business and marketing decisions shape the artists that become successful Dr. Kristin Lieb is an assistant professor of marketing communication at Emerson College. Before coming a professor, she worked as a freelancer for Billboard and Rolling Stone and worked as a marketing executive for several music-related companies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

How did jazz take shape? Why does jazz have so many styles? Why do jazz songs get longer as the twentieth century proceeds? Marc Myers, in his fascinating book Why Jazz Happened (University of California Press, 2014) examines the social and economic forces affected the growth of jazz between 1942 and 1972. Myers considers how the American Federation of Musicians ban on recording in 1942 changes the terrain for jazz musicians. He looks to how the G.I. Bill and suburbanization bring a new adult sophistication to the music. Myers also explores how changes in recording technology allow jazz artists a greater range of expression and permits the recording of longer songs and extended soloing. The book culminates with considering how jazz musicians responded to the challenge offered by rock music. Marc Myers is a writer for The Wall Street Journal and founder of the blog, JazzWax.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

In Vince Guaraldi at the Piano (McFarland Press, 2012),Derrick Bang chronicles San Francisco jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi’s sojourns into the world of jazz from the late 1940s to his untimely death in 1976. Guaraldi, known to most world-wide as the composer and pianist behind the Peanuts’ animated television specials featuring Charlie Brown and Snoopy, also played in Woody Herman’s “Third Herd” big band; composed and recorded a revolutionary Jazz Mass which he performed live in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral in 1965; participated in some magical and memorable live and recorded collaborations with Brazilian guitarist Bola Sete; and was a fixture in the bossa nova Latin jazz San Francisco club scene in the 1950s and 1960s. His “Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus,” based on the soundtrack to the Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Film in 1960, introduced countless people to jazz and the sensuous sounds of bossa nova. His single on the same album, “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” won a Grammy for Best Original Jazz Composition in 1963 and was a successful cross-over song cover on the US Billboard pop chart. Though Vince Guaraldi died in 1976 at the age of only 47, his legacy was revived decades later by David Benoit and George Winston, both of whom recorded covers of his songs. Bang is circumspect about much of Guaraldi’s personal life and he qualifies up front that his book isn’t a traditional biography. Nonetheless, one gets a great feel for the varied and large body of work of this San Francisco-born musician who carved out a unique and enduring niche in the jazz world. Guaraldi had a wonderful sense of rhythm, and his improvisations were almost always melodic. He could swing and play anything from boogie-woogie to bossa nova but will perhaps most be remembered as a joyful player with a sense of playfulness and uplift. You feel good when you hear Vince Guaraldi’s music. With an extensive discography, filmography, and also a large collection of statements and observations by Guaraldi’s peers about his playing, his distinctive handlebar-mustachioed look, and his entertaining persona at the piano, Bang’s book, which represents a lifetime of listening and appreciation and more than four years of extensive research, is a rich and needed testimony to Guaraldi’s musical legacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Today Detroit is down for the count, but as Steve Miller reveals inDetroit Rock City: The Uncensored History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in America’s Loudest City (Da Capo Press, 2013), his comprehensive oral history of the city’s rock scene, the Motor City’s musicians never gave up the fight. Based on dozens of interviews with veteran promoters, leading musicians, and Uberfans, Miller’s insightful conversations trace the evolution of the city’s scene from its blues-rock beginnings through its current rock-rap incarnations. Along the way Miller demonstrates that while Detroit’s rock community never got the respect it deserved from its New York and Los Angeles counterparts, no metropolis did more to make American rock music loud, heavy, and primal. Miller begins his saga at the legendary Grande Ballroom, the now crumbling 1960s mecca for live rock, which hosted superstar acts like the Who and Janis Joplin and served as the springboard for two seminal Detroit acts, the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges. By the early 1970s, Detroit was well on the way to becoming Rock City, USA. It played host to the Goose Lake Festival, a massively successful gathering that rivaled Woodstock. It was home to Creem, the country’s best rock magazine. It incubated the careers of Bob Seger and Ted Nugent, performers who would become two of America’s biggest arena rock acts in the mid-1970s. Miller then expertly navigates the city’s obscure punk scene of the 1980s. Many of the acts will be unfamiliar to readers, but Miller’s own experiences as a musician who played in a Michigan-based punk band during these years give these pages a rawness and immediacy that many such accounts lack. Miller closes with eye-opening perspectives on the city’s current scene by garage rock revivalist Jack White and America’s pariahs of rap, the Insane Clown Posse. One sad postscript to this interview: Iggy and the Stooges co-founder and drummer Scott Asheton died on 15 March 2014 at the age of 64. RIP.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Who is Eminem? Is he a violent misogynist, another “white” performer imitating African American musical styles, or is he something else entirely? In her provocative bookEminem: The Real Slim Shady(Praeger, 2013), Marcia Alesan Dawkins offers a fresh look at Eminem and sees him as a cultural critic, spiritual seeker, and a polyethnic American. Her study examines Eminem’s lyrics closely and helps us understand why he has been such a popular artist. In this interview, Dawkins explains the formative influences that have shaped Eminem’s music. We also discuss how Dawkins reviewed all of his lyrics and coded them into categories. That research reveals how his music has grown and developed over his career. The interview culminates by considering Eminem’s place within hip hop culture. Marcia Dawkins is an award-winning writer and speaker. She is a Professor at the University of Southern California and the author of Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity(2012). She tracks trends in diversity, technology, culture, and communication for a variety of high-profile publications. Her expert opinion has been sought out by NPR, WABC-TV Boston andTIME Magazine. You can find out more information at her website, MarciaDawkins.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

“…when people were hearing us, they were hearing the avant-garde on the one hand, and they were hearing the history of jazz that led up to it on the other hand – because Miles was that history.” -Herbie Hancock, 1968 Professor of music and musician/composer Keith Waters at the University of Colorado, Boulder has produced a masterful analysis of the Miles Davis second quintet studio recordings in the years 1965 through 1968.  Waters analyzes the remarkable period of “controlled freedom” and collaboration between trumpeter Miles Davis, keyboardist Herbie Hancock, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams. Waters writes that “the role of analysis is to provide further, alternative, or nuanced ways into hearing the music, to consider how the moment to moment flow of improvisation resonates with or creates frictions with aspects of jazz traditions in which the players were so firmly rooted, and to hear how the recordings themselves participated in shaping that jazz tradition.” Waters’ comprehensive and nuanced strategies for analyzing pitch, rhythm/meter and form are given context in chapter 2 followed by chapter discussions of specific quintet recordings (and selected solos within) in E.S.P. (Iris, Little One, ESP, Agitation), Miles Smiles (Dolores, Orbits, Circle, Ginger Bread Boy, Freedom Jazz Dance), Sorcerer (Vonetta, Masqualero, Prince of Darkness, Pee Wee, Limbo), Nefertiti (Hand Jive, Nefertiti, Madness, Pinocchio, Riot) in chapters 3- 6, respectively.  The albums Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro (Country Son, Paraphernalia, Black Comedy, Stuff, Petits Machins,  Tout De Suite, Filles de Kilimanjaro), according to Waters, signaled a significant departure from previous recordings/compositions with electric piano, electric bass and rock-based rhythms,  and an “imminent shift to jazz-rock fusion.”    Later groups continued forays into jazz fusion (including those from the second quintet – Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters band, Wayne Shorter’s Weather Report and The Tony Williams Lifetime). Many of the aforementioned compositions have found their way into the “jazz canon,” though Waters cautions that lead sheets may be more indicative of jazz “pedagogies” of the time that don’t reflect the highly complex modal explorations and rhythmic nuances found in the quintet recordings. Waters writes that Miles Davis embraced the concept of “sketches” which “provided his musicians with a germinal idea, allowing room for flexibility and substantial individual input.”  This also blurred the concept of “authorship,” however, since collaborations of this kind brought varied and complex alterations to the many facets of original compositions. Waters’ own biographical sketches of quintet members Davis, Shorter, Hancock, Carter and Williams (their interactions and what they individually said about the music and their musical colleagues) give the reader fascinating insights as to how the sum of the parts of these extraordinarily skilled jazz professionals provided a literal Big Bang of collaborative innovation in a period of three and a half years. The idea of “controlled freedom,” a concept articulated by keyboardist Herbie Hancock, is an important concept in defining the second quintet’s body of work.  Quintet leader Miles Davis, Waters emphasizes, with his “palette of timbres,” and “…melodic ideas in the middle register of the trumpet, “searing lyricism on ballad playing combines tenderness with detachment.”    He was always open to new ideas, experimentation and   artistic challenge. Waters cites critic Robert Walsar’s description of Miles Davis, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Videography is a powerful tool for recording and representing aspects of human society and culture, and anthropologists have long used – and debated the use of – video as a tool to study indigenous and traditional peoples. Indigenous people themselves, however, have increasingly turn video towards their own cultural and communal ends, and this indigenous use of video raises its own questions: who in indigenous communities will control video production? How can video be integrated into indigenous life? And how should indigenous videomakers relate to state and institutional forces. In Indigenous Media in Mexico: Culture, Community, and the State (Duke University Press, 2013), Erica Cusi Wortham examines these issues in the case of “video indígena” in the  Mexican states of Oaxaca and Chiapas during the 1990s.  Indigenous Media in Mexico places video indígena into the historical context of 1990s Mexico, a period marked by both the constitutional recognition of indigenous groups as integral to the Mexican state, but also by the conflict over NAFTA and the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. Video indígena emerged as an initiative of the Mexican Instituto Nacional Indigenista, and was adopted by a range of independent indigenous organizations – some working in collaboration with the state, others in opposition. Through interviews and fieldwork with groups such as Radio y Video Tamix, Ojo de Agua, the K-Xhon Collective, and others, Wortham explores how indigenous videomakers have conceived of video as a tool for activism and community organization, and the difficulties they have faced: problems with equipment and the distribution of their work, but also the deeper problem of developing an accepted social role for video within their own communities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music