New Books in Music

Born in Kentucky, raised in Ohio, apprenticed in Los Angeles, Dwight Yoakam is not your typical mainstream country music star. Indeed, his honky-tonk style of country has always been a throwback to an earlier era, one in which Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris, and Buck Owens ruled the airwaves. It seems an anomaly that Yoakam was at his commercial peak in the days of Garth Brooks and Brooks and Dunn. In Dwight Yoakam: A Thousand Miles from Nowhere (University of Texas Press, 2012), music writer Don McLeese details the history of Yoakam and, especially, his music from an early failed attempt at Nashville acceptance to his tooth-cutting days in the L.A. punk and roots music scene of the early 1980s. They key to Yoakam’s success, writes McLeese, was his vision and determination to make it on mainstream country radio, and make it he did. In the late-80’s through the 90’s Yoakam was one of country music’s biggest stars. Importantly, true to his punk rock roots, he did it on his own terms, making the music that he wanted to make, presenting himself as a character of his own creation. Don McLeese was formerly the pop music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and the Austin American-Statesman, as well as country columnist and contributor to Rolling Stone and a senior editor for No Depression. He currently teaches journalism at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

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! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

In Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India (Duke University Press, 2006) ) Amanda Weidman (scroll down to see her profile) explores how the colonial encounter profoundly shifted the ways South Indian Karnatic music was performed, circulated, and talked about in the twentieth century. The violin became the standard accompanying instrument largely because of the way it could imitate the voice and was seen as modernizing the musical tradition. Karnatic music began to be performed in large concert halls where music reformers expected “pin drop silence” as one would find in European symphony orchestra halls. When musicians published various forms of notation to capture music that had been traditionally passed down orally, new ideas came into being about the composer having sole authorship of a composition. The performers of the music changed as well. Before the early decades of the twentieth century, the only women who could perform South Indian music in public were devadasis, women who came from a community of hereditary musicians and dancers whose repertoire included erotic songs. In the twentieth century various legal, societal, and musical reforms led to the stigmatization of devadasis and their repertoire, while it became acceptable for high-caste Brahmin women to sing in public. Meanwhile, debates about what should be included in the canon of Karnatic music were connected to the language politics of the time, leading to a movement to put Tamil-language compositions on par with the “classical” Telugu and Sanskrit compositions that had become central to the Karnatic music canon of the twentieth century. Amanda was kind enough to speak with me about Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern. I hope you enjoy the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/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! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

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. 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! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music