New Books in Music

“The public don’t understand jazz music as we musicians do. A diminished seventh don’t mean a thing to them, but they go for high notes. After all, the public is paying. If musicians depended on musicians at the box office they would starve to death.”–Louis Armstrong Brian Harker’s Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings (Oxford University Press, 2011) is an artful jambalaya of rigorous musical analysis, thoughtful cultural contexts, and some provocative informed speculation as to how Armstrong absorbed, innovated, and consolidated the music we call jazz. Harker focuses his analysis and discussion on seven of Louis Armstrong’s “Hot Five” recordings, made during the period between 1925 and 1928. Harker’s recording-as-“snap-shot” approach illuminates how Armstrong used novelty, musical narrative, rhythmic variation, harmonic changes, “sweet” and “hot” elements,  and technical virtuosity in his vast recording repertoire. Harker also details how Armstrong relentlessly wedded his drive for self-improvement and creative expression to commercial realities, giving the reader fascinating anecdotes and back stories about this extraordinary African-American’s journey for personal and musical acceptance. Highlights of Harker’s song -by-song analysis include Armstrong’s “novelty” imitation of a clarinet’s cascading arpeggios in “Cornet Chop Suey,” his “telling a story” in “Big Butter and Egg Man,” his negotiation of harmonic changes in “Potato Head Blues,” his crowd-thrilling high note playing in “SOL Blues” and “Gully Low Blues,” his “sweet jazz” elements in “Savoy Blues” and his brilliant amalgam of all the afore-mentioned jazz elements in his masterpiece recording, “West End Blues.” Brian Harker, a Professor of Music at Brigham Young University and former professional trumpet player himself, has spent a good part of his life studying Louis Armstrong. And, he is quite interesting and provocative when he is a speculative detective. Some examples include how he shares the theory that some of Armstrong’s dynamic rhythmic experimentation was inspired by Armstrong’s association with the dance team of Brown and McGraw, or how Armstrong’s sustained high C virtuosity was influenced by his admiration for opera superstar Enrico Caruso as well as his competitive rivalry with trumpeter Reuben Reeves – or how Armstrong’s incorporating elements of “sweet music” (in Savoy Blues) may have been inspired by Armstrong’s own predilection for Guy Lombardo’s sweet jazz as a preferred musical background during his own romantic trysts.  This gives feel and flesh to the book and complements Harker’s studied analyses of Armstrong’s solo transcriptions. Louis Armstrong drew from everything and everyone around him. He constantly tried to improve himself musically and personally and yet, at the same time, resented the “putting on of airs,” all the while negotiating the politics of race and the brutal realities of the music and entertainment world. Harker’s thoughtful cultural introspections gives the reader a greater appreciation for what Armstrong himself had to endure and transcend during the Hot Five recording period of his career. According to Harker, Louis was most proud of his “color barrier” advances in radio and film and saw his Hot Five recordings as simply another pay... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Michael J. Kramer, author of The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), spoke with Ray Haberski about the way rock music became a venue, a medium, and a culture through which diverse groups of people–from the hippies in Berkeley, California... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

After spending millions to steal superstar Brooklyn-based rappers the Beastie Boys away from Def Jam Records in 1988, Capitol Records had high hopes for the act’s follow up effort. And why not? License to Ill (1986) had sold over five million copies while topping the Billboard charts. MTV had fallen in love with the trio and played their videos around the clock. By all accounts their next LP would be another MTV-ready commercial monster. But as Dan LeRoy recounts in his eminently entertaining and essential Paul’s Boutique(Continuum, 2009), the Beastie Boys had a different agenda. They took Capitol’s money and relocated to Los Angeles to party, write and record the new LP. Rather than spend their advance on expensive recording studios, they laid down most of the tracks in the living room of one of their collaborators. While at work, the Beasties — and their producers the Dust Brothers — drew on an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music as they selected the hundreds of samples of other artists’ recordings that they would use (in a legally dubious manner) on their new album. Released with much fanfare in the summer of 1989, Paul’s Boutique would kick off one of the more inexplicable album cycles in pop music history. LeRoy notes that the album lacked a true single and likewise, the Beasties chose not to tour behind it. The final result was an LP that went over the heads of most Beastie Boys fans and dropped from the charts within months of its release. As Le Roy demonstrates, however, Paul’s Boutique has come to be recognized as a revolutionary album that presaged the ways in which pop music is created and consumed today. Dan LeRoy is Director of Literary Arts at Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School in Midland, PA. He has written for the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and many other publications. He is the co-author, with Michael Lipton, of Twenty Years of Mountain Stage, a history of the NPR musical variety show, and The Greatest Music Never Sold: Secrets of Legendary Live Albums David Bowie, Seal, Beastie Boys, Beck, Chicago, Mick Jagger & More! He lives near Pittsburgh with his wife and three children. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

It’s Christmas Eve at the Houston City Auditorium, 1954, and Big Mama Thornton is belting out “Hound Dog,” her hit from the previous year. It’s the years just before Elvis, before rock and roll, when white and black musics were still segregated, officially at least. But the white kids were catching on to the Rhythm and Blues sounds of cats like Fats Domino, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and, up in his dressing room waiting for his turn on stage, Johnny Ace. Tragically, however, Ace wouldn’t make it to perform. A favorite hand-gun mixed with a tough-guy attitude, a couple of pretty women, and an arch-nemeses lead to death by his own hand; Johnny Ace shot himself this night in a game of Russian Roulette. In The Death of Johnny Ace (Dancing Traveler Publishing, 2012), Steve Bergsman gives a fictionalized account of the years leading up to Ace’s demise: his humble beginnings in Memphis, his mercurial rise to stardom on Duke-Peacock Records, and his final hours in Houston. Johnny Ace was a pre-rock ‘n’ roll star on the cusp of superstardom, Steve Bergsman tells us how he got there, and how it all ended. Steve Bergsman has contributed to a wide range of magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, Global Finance, Chief Executive, and Investment Dealer’s Digest. He has contributed to the “Ground Floor” real estate column in Barron’s, written for most of the leading real estate industry publications, and published numerous books, including After the Fall: Opportunities and Strategies for Real Estate Investing in the Coming Decade and Growing up in Levittown: In a time of Conformity, Controversy and Cultural Crises. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

In the late 1960s, Nashville’s recording industry was a hit-making machine. A small clique of writers, producers, engineers and session musicians gave sonic shape to the pop-friendly “Nashville Sound” and generated hit after hit for artists like Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline. For up-and-coming artists like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, the same rules regarding creative control applied. Decisions about song choices and production teams would be made by executives at big record labels like RCA and not the artists. By the early 1970s, a rebellion was afoot in Music City. As Michael Streissguth demonstrates in his page-turning Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris and the Renegades of Nashville(It Books, 2013), the commercial ascent of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson coincided with their fierce challenge to the industry’s power structure. In Kristofferson’s case, his 1970 debut album — nurtured and recorded by a production team independent of the Nashville Machine — offered a range of songs that owed more to Bob Dylan than Bobby Bare. For Willie Nelson, a string of commercially unsuccessful albums for RCA prompted the label to drop him. Nelson retreated to Austin and recorded his declaration of musical independence, the wildly successful Shotgun Willie (1973). And after years of battling with RCA, Jennings convinced the label to let him co-produce one of his albums, the landmarkLonesome, On’ry and Mean (1973). As a result of these events, the three men experienced significant commercial success as part of country music’s “Outlaw Movement.” While Kristofferson achieved his biggest fame as a Hollywood movie star, Jennings and Nelson churned out a string of hit albums. The careers of all three were boosted by a savvy marketing campaign that saw them packaged as “outlaws” who had successfully rebelled against the Nashville establishment. This image received further assistance, Streissguth points out, from a messy string of divorces, drug busts, and in the case of Jennings, a monumental cocaine habit. Well researched and written, Outlaw offers an engaging chronicle of the lives of these three men and makes clear that the influence of the Outlaw Country genre has extended far beyond its 1970s heyday. Michael Streissguth is a professor in the department of Communication and Film Studies at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY. He is the author of several books including Johnny Cash: The Biography (Da Capo, 2006). He has produced two documentary films: “Record Paradise” (2012) and “Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison” (2008). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

By the fall of 1986, the Los Angeles heavy metal band Slayer had two solid but unspectacular records, 1984’s Haunting the Chapel and 1985’s Hell Awaits, to their name. Meanwhile, producer Rick Rubin had started a record company, Def Jam, in his dorm room in NYU, and after a handful of successful rap releases, was on the lookout for new talent for his label. In a New York City nightclub, he found it in Slayer. D.X. Ferris, in his taut and entertaining 33 1/3 series bookReign in Blood, explains how this seemingly incongruous paring of a rap guru and four speed-metal merchants ended up making rock history with their 1986 thrash-metal release Reign in Blood. Rubin, whose genius has always resided in his ability to help artists capture the essence of their greatness, found the band’s lengthy, more traditional heavy metal songs unappealing. What he liked, Ferris argues, was the faster, heavier, and aggressive aspects of Slayer’s material. This made him a perfect partner for the band’s late guitarist, Jeff Hanneman, who loved hardcore punk rock almost as much as he loved heavy metal. The resulting album, Ferris maintains, is “the gold standard for extreme heavy metal.” The LP’s ten songs are played with military precision and at a frenzied pace. And its lyrical themes are nothing if not disturbing: serial killers, witches burned at the stake, pandemics, the fall of Heaven, and perhaps most extreme of all, a meditation on Nazi sadist Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s depraved “Angel of Death.” This last song, as Ferris shows, stirred charges of anti-Semitism and encouraged CBS Records to back away from its deal to distribute the LP. By drawing on interviews with everyone from members of Slayer to fans, the witty and engaging Ferris makes a convincing case for the album’s significance and its continuing influence in the world of heavy metal. D.X. Ferris is the author of Reign in Blood and has contributed pieces for RollingStone.com, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, Popdose, Village Voice, and Decibel, among other publications. He is also the creator of Suburban Metal Dad, Heavy Metal Game of Thrones Reviews and is the proprietor of Pentagrammarian.com, the world’s only metal-oriented grammar and usage website. For his work he was named the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists’ Reporter of the Year in 2011 and is the recipient of numerous other journalism and writing awards. Ferris can be reached on Twitter @dxferrisand @slayerbook. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

At the dawn of the twenty first century, the music business looked forward to its sixth decade of monopolistic dominance of the sale and manufacture of recorded music. An industry that once had dozens of labels competing for consumer dollars had become, thanks to a series of mergers, controlled by a small handful of international conglomerates by the late nineties. Similar trends had played out in the commercial-radio and concert industry sectors of the industry. The net result was massive profits for these multinational corporations, and rising prices for compact discs and concert tickets for consumers. Yet as Chicago Tribune music critic Greg Kot ably and acerbically shows in his page-turning Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music(Scribner, 2009) the landscape of the industry had been utterly transformed within a decade. In 1999, the introduction of the Napster peer-to-peer file sharing service made it possible for anyone with an Internet connection and a computer to download and create a huge music library, all without paying a cent to artists or their labels. The creation of such digital networks also allowed artists to market and sell their music directly to consumers, thereby bypassing the industry’s label system. This digital revolution likewise rendered compact discs, once the driver of industry profits, on the path to obsolescence and made the iPod as essential to music consumption as the phonograph had been for much of the twentieth century. Through his illuminating interviews with key figures drawn from all sectors of the industry, Kot skillfully makes sense of this dizzying era of change, one that has seen long established notions of copyright, profit, and creativity in the music business all called into question. Greg Kot has been the Tribune‘s music critic covering pop, rock, and hip-hop since 1990. He is the author of three other books, including Wilco: Learning How to Die (Three Rivers Press, 2004), and hosts the nationally syndicated radio program Sound Opinions, “the world’s only rock ‘n’ roll talk show,” which can be heard on over one hundred stations nationwide. His next book, I’ll Take You There: Mavis Staples, the Staple Singers and the March up Freedom’s Highway, will be published by Scribner in January 2014. He can be reached through his personal blog,gregkot.com, and via Twitter@gregkot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

What’s the difference between a fiddle and a violin? What about the difference between a hornpipe and a reel, a hoedown and a breakdown? The answer to the former, of course, is that you don’t spill beer on a violin. For answers to the latter, I point you to Play Me Something Quick and Devilish: Old-Time Fiddlers in Missouri (University of Missouri Press, 2012) where Howard Wight Marshall details the history and intricacies of a style of music that has endured 200 or so years of cultural migrations, regionalisms, taverns, schools, and contests. Marshall tracks the music as it came to America in colonial times with the French, Scottish, and Irish, but was also played by Germans, African-Americans, and Native Americans. He shows the prevalence of the violin among brigades on both sides of the American Civil War, the influence of musical literacy on the upkeep of the fiddling, and the assimilation of fiddle playing with ragtime and jazz in the early 20th century. All-in-all, Marshall’s text offers a comprehensive look at a music that most of us know of, but not about; a music that, though not given its rightful due, can still be heard both in its “pure” form, and also as a component of much contemporary popular music. Howard Wight Marshall is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Missouri, Columbia. He is the author or editor of several other books including Barns of Missouri. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

When I was a teenager growing up in the early 80s, I took it as an article of faith that punk rock and heavy metal were definably different genres. To be sure, punk and metal bands both played heavy, loud, and fast music, but beyond those sonic similarities, these groups and their fans seemed to have little in common. When I read heavy metal magazines, metal musicians expressed contempt for punk bands and their purported lack of musical talent. Conversely, when I read the skateboarding magazine Thrasher, punk musicians mocked heavy metal acts for their supposed obsession with instrumental virtuosity. Closer to home, the shorthaired punkers who wore Black Flag shirts and combat boots to school sneered at the longhaired metalheads who donned their Black Sabbathshirts and high-top sneakers. And so my sense of this divide was crystal clear by the time a punk-rock loving friend of mine played the Circle Jerks’ 1985 hardcore punk anthem “American Heavy Metal Weekend” for me, which lampooned metal bands for their provinciality and lack of authenticity. It turns out that like a lot of critics, fans, and scholars who have observed this dynamic, I what I thought I knew about heavy metal and punk rock wasn’t quite right. As Steve Waksman shows in his illuminating and entertaining This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (University of California Press, 2009),punk and metal engaged in a relationship of musical cross-pollination that stretches back to the early 1970s, more than a decade before the notion of punk-metal “crossover” became part and parcel of the culture of heavy music. Drawing on the insights of music theorists, critics, and journalists and based upon a close examination of the interviews, writings, and music of dizzying array of bands and musicians, Waksman offers an essential revisionist study that helps to redefine popular conceptions of these abrasive and aggressive musical forms. Steve Waksman is an Associate Professor of Music at Smith College. Along with an array of essays and reviews, he has written two books,Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience(Harvard University Press, 1999), and This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk, which won the prestigious Woody Guthrie Award for best scholarly book on popular music by the U.S. chapter of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music in 2010. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

The relationship between music and religion is a site of increasing interest to scholars within Religious Studies. Monica Miller, Assistant Professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Lehigh University, explores the social processes and human activity related to Hip Hop music and its accompanying cultural expressions. In Religion and Hip Hop (Routledge, 2012) she introduces us to the various methods that have been used to examine Hip Hop culture and the descriptive terrain of previous scholarship. What is possibly the most laudable aspect of Miller’s efforts are her continued and repeated explorations into the purposes, effects, and operations of theory and method in the study of religion. In this regard, she does not perform a theological or religious analysis of music or lyrics as a search for meaning but rather examines the material productions of Hip Hop culture and the manufactured zones of significance within various discourses. Miller looks at the public context of Hip Hop culture and its relationship to larger social pathologies, the religious rhetoric and style of Hip-Hop knowledge productions or books written by Hip Hop artists, and a visual ethnography of the dance culture of Krumping where the body is examined as a site of significance through aesthetics, style, taste, and dispositions. Very often these interrogations challenge the category of religion in new ways and leave us asking what counts as religion and what is left out. Altogether, Miller does a lot in this book, much of which we did not get to discuss in detail. In our conversation we discussed authorial authority, social constructionism, youth religious participation, the Black Church, KRS One, morality, intentionality and habitus, complex subjectivity, postmodernism, classification, and many other interesting things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music