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It Is Written
It Is Written
4d
It Is Written
Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (John Szwed)
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If you want to challenge yourself as a biographer, you do what John Szwed did, and you select Sun Ra (Herman Blount) as your book's subject. How to take a life story as complex, prolific and yet enigmatic as the one that Sun Ra lived and transcribe it into writing is no small feat. Szwed's biography looks at Sun Ra's life story geographically, examining the places he resided and how those areas impacted his art and thinking (and vice versa), tracking the Saturnian's ever-evolving music, philosophies, art, aesthetic ideas, etc., and his deep commitment to each. You start a book like this expecting to be surprised, and you will end up being surprised in ways you anticipated and ways you didn't. Serious props to Szwed for taking it upon himself in routinely endeavoring to describe in concrete language the music found throughout much of Sun Ra's massive discography and the infinite variety of sounds, tones, moods and messages contained therein.
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4d
It Is Written
A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead (Dennis McNally)
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If there can be such thing as a "definitive" historical document of the Grateful Dead, then I suppose it ought to come from the band's official historian. Dennis McNally's A Long Strange Trip offers an incredible, at times unbelievable, 600-page chronicle of America's most singular and inexplicable band (and even at that, heads will tell you it's really only the tip of the tie-dye iceberg!). The book is structured to include interludes between the regular chapters that work to capture some of the intangible and unique aspects of the Dead, their sound, their live shows, their fans and the culture shared between them, their perpetual touring machine, their commitment to technological advance and beyond. A Long Strange Trip is best viewed principally as a deep study into the band's first decade and then as a historical survey of its full 30-year history--it's not until over 500 pages in that you arrive at the Brent era.
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4d
It Is Written
Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century (Nate Chinen)
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Nate Chinen's book carries a clear mission within its pages: correct the mainstream misunderstanding that jazz is culturally and artistically inert in the present century to show readers that the genre and its many contemporary players are, in fact, as prolific and boldly innovative as ever. Chinen writes each chapter of Playing Changes to focus on a musician who has taken part in shaping the modern evolution of jazz, discussing that person's art and views while also placing them as a hub to branch out into connections formed across contemporaries, genres, places and histories. Even if you haven't yet paid much attention to the jazz of the 21st century, you'll probably recognize some of the names he centers in his chapters (e.g., Kamasi Washington, Esperanza Spalding, Wayne Shorter, Roy Hargrove, Vijay Iyer, Brad Mehldau). As a read, Playing Changes is enormously interesting, and Chinen includes his personal list of The 129 Essential Albums of the Twenty-First Century (So Far) to make this book a handy reference text for the curious listener.
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4d
It Is Written
This Little Ziggy (Martin Newell)
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An unflinching, gut-wrenching, hilarious and lovingly-recounted story of trying to make the big time as a musician, and one of my favorite books in general. There's no need to be familiar with songwriter-poet Martin Newell or his long-running project, The Cleaners From Venus, in order to enjoy his memoir. This Little Ziggy contains Newell's coming-of-age story in Swinging London and unrequited effort to win over the English music scene as the frontman of a glam rock outfit called Plod ("Colchester's finest!") during the height of the Spiders From Mars invasion upon the airwaves and youth culture. That said, if you are familiar with Newell's creative output, you'll recognize the same affable disposition, easy wit, keen humor and wide-eyed enthusiasm for life in his prose that give so much character to his music. Newell's second memoir, The Greatest Living Englishman, is also worth reading if you are a fan of The Cleaners.
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