Composers Musicians category: 3267 books

Across the state and across a wide variety of musical genres, women are making their mark on Texas music. Some have become international superstars, while others are just starting to make their voices heard. But every woman who goes out and plays her music proves that "baring one's heart and soul...

** “I want to go home with the Armadillo.”** ​And you will, too, once you’ve picked up Gary P. Nunn’s new memoir of the life and times of this true Texas original. As one of the founding fathers of the progressive country music scene in Austin, Texas, Nunn helped change the face of popular...

With Hit Me, Fred, sensational sideman Fred Wesley Jr. moves front and center to tell his life story. A legendary funk, soul, and jazz musician, Wesley is best known for his work in the late sixties and early seventies with James Brown and as the leader of Brown’s band, Fred Wesley and the JB’s....

I Found My Friends recreates the short and tempestuous times of Nirvana through the musicians and producers who played and interacted with the band. The guides for this trip didn't just watch the life of this legendary band—they lived it. Soulsby interviewed over 150 musicians from bands that played...

Just after recording with John Coltrane in 1963, baritone singer Johnny Hartman (1923–1983) told a family member that “something special” occurred in the studio that day. He was right – the album, containing definitive readings of “Lush Life” and “My One and Only Love,” resides firmly...

Leading Tones is a glimpse into several aspects of the musical world. There are portions devoted to Leonard Slatkin's life as a musician and conductor, portraits of some of the outstanding artists with whom he has worked, as well as anecdotes and stories both personal and professional. Much of the...

Gay never recorded an album, never won a Juno. His music existed in the moment, appreciated by the few who were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. For the rest of us, those late-night jam sessions in a shack in an alley on the bad side of Edmonton never happened. We never got...

If Benny Goodman was the "King of Swing," then Fletcher Henderson was the power behind the throne. Now Jeffrey Magee offers a fascinating account of Henderson's musical career, throwing new light on the emergence of modern jazz and the world that created it. Drawing on an unprecedented combination...

Romantic Anatomies of Performance is concerned with the very matter of musical expression: the hands and voices of virtuosic musicians. Rubini, Chopin, Nourrit, Liszt, Donzelli, Thalberg, Velluti, Sontag, and Malibran were prominent celebrity pianists and singers who plied their trade between London...

Songwriting in Contemporary West Virginia: Profiles and Reflections is the first book dedicated to telling the stories of West Virginia’s extensive community of songwriters.  Based on oral histories conducted by Stimeling and told largely in the songwriters’ own words, these profiles offer a...

The book includes selected stories connected with the memories of exciting transient moments of the writers life. These works, basically, have an autobiographic character and are often penetrated by romantic perception of events. They also mention both the eternal subjects of human life and the most...

For more than fifty years, Chicago drummer Jimmi Mayes served as a sideman behind some of the greatest musicians and musical groups in history. He began his career playing the blues in the juke joints of Mississippi, sharpened his trade under the mentorship of drum legends Sam Lay and Fred Below in...

A group of three friends who made music in a house in Lubbock, Texas, recorded an album that wasn't released and went their separate ways into solo careers. That group became a legend and then—twenty years later—a band. The Flatlanders—Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Butch Hancock—are icons...

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the most unfathomable composers in the history of music. How can such sublime work have been produced by a man who (when we can discern his personality at all) seems so ordinary, so opaque—and occasionally so intemperate? John Eliot Gardiner grew up passing...