California Press: 1495 books
Imperial Heights
Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina
Language: English
Release Date: April 8, 2011
Intended as a reminder of Europe for soldiers and clerks of the empire, the city of Dalat, located in the hills of Southern Vietnam, was built by the French in an alpine locale that reminded them of home. This book uncovers the strange 100-year history of a colonial city that was conceived as a center...
Coming Famine
The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It
Language: English
Release Date: August 10, 2010
In The Coming Famine, Julian Cribb lays out a vivid picture of impending planetary crisis--a global food shortage that threatens to hit by mid-century--that would dwarf any in our previous experience. Cribb's comprehensive assessment describes a dangerous confluence of shortages--of water, land, energy,...
Changing Planet, Changing Health
How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do about It
Language: English
Release Date: April 4, 2011
Climate change is now doing far more harm than marooning polar bears on melting chunks of ice—it is damaging the health of people around the world. Brilliantly connecting stories of real people with cutting-edge scientific and medical information, Changing Planet, Changing Health brings us to places...
by John Goodman
Language: English
Release Date: May 20, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: May 20, 2013
Charles Mingus is among jazz’s greatest composers and perhaps its most talented bass player. He was blunt and outspoken about the place of jazz in music history and American culture, about which performers were the real thing (or not), and much more. These in-depth interviews, conducted several...
Better Git It in Your Soul
An Interpretive Biography of Charles Mingus
Language: English
Release Date: February 8, 2016
Charles Mingus is one of the most important—and most mythologized—composers and performers in jazz history. Classically trained and of mixed race, he was an outspoken innovator as well as a bandleader, composer, producer, and record-label owner. His vivid autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, has...
Music Makes Me
Fred Astaire and Jazz
Language: English
Release Date: June 24, 2011
Fred Astaire: one of the great jazz artists of the twentieth century? Astaire is best known for his brilliant dancing in the movie musicals of the 1930s, but in Music Makes Me, Todd Decker argues that Astaire’s work as a dancer and choreographer —particularly in the realm of tap dancing—made...
by Marc Myers
Language: English
Release Date: December 10, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: December 10, 2012
Why Jazz Happened is the first comprehensive social history of jazz. It provides an intimate and compelling look at the many forces that shaped this most American of art forms and the many influences that gave rise to jazz’s post-war styles. Rich with the voices of musicians, producers, promoters,...
The Amazing Bud Powell
Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop
Language: English
Release Date: May 28, 2013
Bud Powell was not only one of the greatest bebop pianists of all time, he stands as one of the twentieth century’s most dynamic and fiercely adventurous musical minds. His expansive musicianship, riveting performances, and inventive compositions expanded the bebop idiom and pushed jazz musicians...
Jazz Matters
Sound, Place, and Time since Bebop
Language: English
Release Date: October 7, 2010
What, where, and when is jazz? To most of us jazz means small combos, made up mostly of men, performing improvisationally in urban club venues. But jazz has been through many changes in the decades since World War II, emerging in unexpected places and incorporating a wide range of new styles. In this...
by Susan McClary
Language: English
Release Date: March 6, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: March 6, 2012
In this book, Susan McClary examines the mechanisms through which seventeenth-century musicians simulated extreme affective states—desire, divine rapture, and ecstatic pleasure. She demonstrates how every major genre of the period, from opera to religious music to instrumental pieces based on dances,...
by David Schiff
Language: English
Release Date: February 21, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: February 21, 2012
Breaking down walls between genres that are usually discussed separately—classical, jazz, and popular—this highly engaging book offers a compelling new integrated view of twentieth-century music. Placing Duke Ellington (1899–1974) at the center of the story, David Schiff explores music written...
Loft Jazz
Improvising New York in the 1970s
Language: English
Release Date: December 13, 2016
The New York loft jazz scene of the 1970s was a pivotal period for uncompromising, artist-produced work. Faced with a flagging jazz economy, a group of young avant-garde improvisers chose to eschew the commercial sphere and develop alternative venues in the abandoned factories and warehouses of Lower...
The Castrato
Reflections on Natures and Kinds
Language: English
Release Date: February 20, 2015
The Castrato is a nuanced exploration of why innumerable boys were castrated for singing between the mid-sixteenth and late-nineteenth centuries. It shows that the entire foundation of Western classical singing, culminating in bel canto, was birthed from an unlikely and historically unique set of...
Experimentalism Otherwise
The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits
Language: English
Release Date: April 4, 2011
In Experimental Otherwise, Benjamin Piekut takes the reader into the heart of what we mean by "experimental" in avant-garde music. Focusing on one place and time—New York City, 1964—Piekut examines five disparate events: the New York Philharmonic’s disastrous performance of John Cage’s...