As one of the greatest rock icons of all time, Gregg Allman has lived it all and then some. For almost fifty years, he’s been creating some of the most recognizable songs in American rock, but never before has he paused to reflect on the long road he’s traveled. Now, he tells the unflinching story of his life, laying bare the unvarnished truth about his wild ride that has spanned across the years.

The story begins simply: with Gregg and his older brother, Duane, growing up in the South, raising hell with their guitars, and drifting from one band to another. But all that changed when Duane and Gregg came together with four other men to forge something new—a unique sound shaped by soul, rock, and blues and brimming with experimentation; a sound not just of a band, but of a family.

Bringing to life the carefree early days of the Allman Brothers Band, Gregg holds nothing back—from run-ins with the law to meeting girls on the road, from jamming at the Fillmore East to experimenting with drugs. Along the way, he goes behind the scenes of some of greatest rock music ever recorded, without shying away from the infamous and painful deaths of his brother, Duane, and Allman Brothers bassist Berry Oakley. Speaking for the first time about the profound impact that his brother’s death had on him, Gregg offers a tribute to Duane that only a younger brother could write, showing how, to this day, he still confronts the grief of losing his big brother, even as Duane continues to guide and inspire him.

Setting the record straight about the band’s struggles in the face of death, Gregg shows how the decision to persevere came with a heavy price. While the rock and roll excesses of drugs, alcohol, and personality clashes led to a series of breakups that culminated with the band’s permanent reunion in 1989, Gregg fought his own battle with substance abuse, going to rehab no less than eleven times and floating through a string of failed marriages, including his tabloid-frenzied relationship with Cher, before finally cleaning up once and for all.

Capturing the Allman Brothers’ ongoing, triumphant resurgence as well as his own recent fight against hepatitis C and featuring over one hundred photos from throughout the band’s history, Gregg presents a story as honest as it is fascinating, providing a glimpse inside one of the most beloved and notorious bands in the history of rock music and demonstrating how, through it all, the road goes on . . . forever.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Gregg Allman

Gregg Allman is one of the original members of the Allman Brothers Band and a legend of American music. A recipient of a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 and continues to make music as a solo artist and with the Allman Brothers. A multiple Grammy Award winner, he has sold millions of records around the world, with his most recent album, Low Country Blues, debuting at No. 5 on the Billboard chart. He lives in Georgia.

Alan Light is a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone and the New York Times. The former editor-in-chief of Spin and Vibe magazines, he is a two-time winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music writing.

Editorial Review

Addicted to drugs and alcohol for much of his adult life and married multiple times, the author certainly has a hayloft full of celebrity scandal to sift through. While ABB’s principal songwriter and lead vocalist covers all of his lowlights, he’s much more interested in exploring the fantastic blend of blues, rock and jazz that so famously bonded he and late brother Duane to four other maverick musicians starting in the late 1960s. This is a story about musical brotherhood. With gentlemanly charm and compassion, the author vividly recounts how a guitar first transformed the lives of two restless boys living in Florida with their widowed mom. Allman’s portrayal of his complicated relationship with Duane is rich and moving. Although dead by the age of 24 following a tragic motorcycle crash, Duane (considered one of the greatest guitar players of all-time) nonetheless looms large in these pages. The author’s ability to share his enduring guilt in the aftermath of Duane’s tragic passing is nothing less than profound. After successfully receiving a new liver in 2010, Allman appears to have at least one more silver dollar left in his pocket. As his many-faceted memoir so effectively demonstrates, the road does, indeed, go on forever for the Allman Brothers Band. – Kirkus Reviews

Gregg Allman’s memoir, ‘My Cross to Bear’

The Washington Post Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

Gregg Allman didn’t sell his soul to the devil. But if he had, the transaction would probably rate just a paragraph toward the back of his new memoir, “My Cross to Bear,” sandwiched between an ode to motorcycles and a two-sentence account of his fourth marriage.

The Southern blues-rocker, who’s played off and on with the Allman Brothers Band since 1969, has experienced many born-under-a-bad-sign moments. His story includes overdoses, emergency surgeries and rehab stints; six wives and five children (not necessarily from his marriages); and myriad suicides, murders and fatal crashes. As fans know well, older brother Duane died in a motorcycle wreck in 1971, and bassist Berry Oakley perished the same way at almost the same spot a year later. Cynics might say this is routine rock-bio stuff. The weird thing is that Allman seems to agree.

Credited to Allman and rock writer Alan Light, “My Cross to Bear” has a melodramatic title but a phlegmatic outlook. Duane Allman’s death was clearly important to his brother, as it was to a band that had just begun to attract a major following, in large part because of Duane’s guitar prowess. But the loss doesn’t register as particularly important in this just-the-facts telling that gives every event roughly the same emphasis. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Robin Gibb, a Bee Gee With a Taciturn Manner, Dies at 62
The New York Times – May 20, 2012

Robin Gibb, one of the three singing brothers of the Bee Gees, the long-running Anglo-Australian pop group whose chirping falsettos and hook-laden disco hits like “Jive Talkin’ ” and “You Should Be Dancing” shot them to worldwide fame in the 1970s, died on Sunday in London. He was 62 and lived in Thame, Oxfordshire, England.

The cause was complications of cancer and intestinal surgery, his family said in a statement. [Read the full article...]

My association with the Bee Gees’ music, however, is not their disco music but their romantic rock during the 1960s when I was a teenager living in Germany. Yes, I do have their Saturday Night Fever CD somewhere, but it would require some digging to find it. However, these days I occasionally listen to their older albums like Bee Gees’ First, Horizontal, and Odessa.

Let me put that into perspective: The Bee Gees of the 1960s outranked the Beatles ‘ popularity in Germany. As a teenager you read (and I believe, they still do) the Bravo magazine, a magazine dedicated to show biz for teenagers. At the time, I could hardly afford buying it, but I always saved the money for the special edition that included the popularity vote for the year, and, again, the Bee Gees were number one most of these years.

And yes, Robin Gibb was my personal favorite, because I liked his songs best. Of course, all song are labeled as composed by Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb, but you can tell primarily by the lead singer who wrote it. It’s like the Lennon-McCartney songs that were labeled as such per default, even in cases where the other wasn’t involved with the actual composition.

I remember the turmoil when one of Barry’s compositions, First of May, was set as the A side of the (vinyl) single in 1969. Robin’s much stronger song, Lamplight, was demoted to the B side, which turned out not only to be the wrong business decision, but also led to their breakup soon thereafter. Needless to say, but Lamplight, even though it was only the B-side, was a major success in Germany. Also, since that time I developed a dislike for Barry, which was confirmed by the tremendous ego he displayed during their disco time.

And it was Robin who pursued his ambition of writing music on a more sophisticated level, even classical music, and this year’s release of Gibb: The Titanic Requiem proves his tremendous talent. I have always been a great fan of music representing a mixture of classical music and rock elements a la Mike Batt. Naturally, Requiem is now part of my collection.

However, looking back at the past and my personal life, my favorite is still Massachusetts. It’s a simple but nevertheless beautiful song. I bought the single when I was thirteen years old using the money that I had saved for over a year. At the time I did not understand the lyrics, and nowadays I realize how simple they are. But for me, being thirteen yard old, it was a dream come true.

It also turns out that now live in Massachusetts, not due to Robin’s song but pure coincidence, but it makes the song (and its composer) even more valuable to me.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Mr. Broadway was completed just one month before Gerald Schoenfeld’s death in 2008 at the age of 84. Bringing the reader backstage, the long-term chairman of the Shubert Organization shares his triumphs and failures, sings praise, and settles scores. He recounts nightmarish tales of the Shuberts, themselves – the meanness of Lee, the madness of JJ, the turmoil surrounding John’s personal life, and the drunken ineptitude of Lawrence Shubert Lawrence, Jr., the man who succeeded them and nearly brought the Shubert legacy to an ignominious end.

An active participant in that legacy for over 50 years, Schoenfeld describes how he and his partner, Bernie Jacobs, saved the Shubert Organization, bringing some of Broadway’s greatest hits to the stage – from A Chorus Line, Equus, and Amadeus to Pippin, Les Miserables, Evita, Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, Godspell, Ain’t Misbehavin’, Dreamgirls, Dancin’, Sunday in the Park with George, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Heidi Chronicles, The Gin Game, Miss Saigon, and Chess.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Gerald Schoenfeld

Gerald Schoenfeld, chairman of the Shubert Organization for more than 35 years, was one of the most influential people in commercial theater. He is credited with being a catalyst for the revival of Broadway and the theater district/Times Square in New York City.

Editorial Review

In this posthumously published memoir, Schoenfeld — the long-standing chairman of the Shubert Organization, who had a hand in producing some of Broadway’s biggest shows (e.g., Les Miserables, Cats, and The Phantom of the Opera) — reflects in conversational vignettes on his successes and failures. He discusses his progression from lawyer for the temperamental Shubert family — one of the biggest names in Broadway history — to chairman of the organization. While Schoenfeld does not hold back with regard to the backstabbing, volatile bosses, and difficult actors he encountered, he also reveals the great joy he garnered from his more than 50 years in the theater world. The book includes a foreword by Hugh Jackman and an introduction by Alec Baldwin; both actors knew Schoenfeld personally. –Library Journal

The Man Behind the Curtain - ‘Mr. Broadway,’ a Memoir by Gerald Schoenfeld

The New York Times Book Review – April 19, 2012 (Excerpt)

The subtitle of “Mr. Broadway,” a posthumously published memoir by Gerald Schoenfeld, the longtime chairman of the theatrical powerhouse the Shubert Organization, promises us “The Inside Story of the Shuberts, the Shows, and the Stars.” That’s a pretty accurate description of this straightforward book written by a major player in the theater world for almost half a century, who died in 2008.

It could also serve as a warning to any civilians who might happen upon it, although with the decline of bricks-and-mortar bookstores it’s getting harder and harder to happen upon books these days. If you have no idea who “the Shuberts” were or are — the Shubert Organization is the largest theater owner on Broadway, with 17 houses there, as well as a leading producing entity — Schoenfeld’s reminiscences are not likely to enthrall. This intermittently engrossing but patchy book is strictly for readers with an unquenchable thirst for show business lore.

Certainly Schoenfeld, a courtly, avuncular presence on the theater scene but a pugnacious negotiator when it came time to sign contracts, had dealings over the years with most of the onstage and backstage luminaries in the business. But while the memoir includes not one but two celebrity forewords — by Alec Baldwin and Hugh Jackman, who notes cheerfully, “I can’t wait to read this book” — its tales of Schoenfeld’s encounters with boldface names are often less entertaining than his recollections of his tumultuous early years as a lawyer with the organization. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

“Danny Boy” (“Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling”) was written by the English lawyer Frederick Edward Weatherly in 1910, and set to the tune in 1913.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

History

The title of the air came from the name of County Londonderry in Ireland. The air was collected by Jane Ross of Limavady.

Ross submitted the tune to music collector George Petrie, and it was then published by the Society for the Preservation and Publication of the Melodies of Ireland in the 1855 book The Ancient Music of Ireland, which Petrie edited. The tune was listed as an anonymous air, with a note attributing its collection to Jane Ross of Limavady.

For the following beautiful air I have to express my very grateful acknowledgement to Miss J. Ross, of New Town, Limavady, in the County of Londonderry—a lady who has made a large collection of the popular unpublished melodies of the county , which she has very kindly placed at my disposal, and which has added very considerably to the stock of tunes which I had previously acquired from that still very Irish county. I say still very Irish, for though it has been planted for more than two centuries by English and Scottish settlers, the old Irish race still forms the great majority of its peasant inhabitants; and there are few, if any counties in which, with less foreign admixture, the ancient melodies of the country have been so extensively preserved. The name of the tune unfortunately was not ascertained by Miss Ross, who sent it to me with the simple remark that it was ‘very old’, in the correctness of which statement I have no hesitation in expressing my perfect concurrence.

This led to the descriptive title “Londonderry Air” being used for the piece; the title “Air from County Derry” or “Derry Air” is sometimes used instead, due to the Derry-Londonderry name dispute.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The origin of the tune was for a long time somewhat mysterious, as no other collector of folk tunes encountered it, and all known examples are descended from Ross’s submission to Petrie’s collection. In a 1934 article, Anne Geddes Gilchrist suggested that the performer Ross heard played the song with extreme rubato, causing Ross to mistake the time signature of the piece for common time (4/4) rather than 3/4. Gilchrist asserted that adjusting the rhythm of the piece as she proposed produced a tune more typical of Irish folk music.

In 1974, Hugh Shields found a long-forgotten traditional song which was very similar to Gilchrist’s modified version of the melody. The song, Aislean an Oigfear (in modern Irish Aisling an Óigfhir, “The young man’s dream”), had been transcribed by Edward Bunting in 1792 based on a performance by harper Donnchadh Ó Hámsaigh at the Belfast Harp Festival. Bunting published it in 1796. Ó Hámsaigh lived in Magilligan, not far from Ross’s home in Limavady. Hempson died in 1807. In 2000, Brian Audley published his authoritative research on the tune’s origins. He showed how the distinctive high section of the tune had derived from a refrain in The Young Man’s Dream which, over time, crept into the body of the music. He also discovered the original words to the tune as we now know it which were written by Edward Fitzsimmons and published in 1814; his song is ‘The Confession of Devorgilla’, otherwise known by its first line ‘Oh Shrive Me Father’.

The descendants of blind fiddler Jimmy McCurry assert that he is the musician from whom she transcribed the tune but there is no historical evidence to support this speculation. A similar claim is made that the tune came to the blind itinerant harpist Rory Dall O’Cahan in a dream, and a documentary detailing this version was broadcast on the Maryland Public Television in USA in March 2000.; reference to this was also made by historian John Hamilton in Michael Portillo’s TV programme “Great British Railway Journeys Goes to Ireland” in February 2012. – Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Londonderry_Air

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

Carole King takes us from her early beginnings in Brooklyn, to her remarkable success as one of the world’s most acclaimed songwriting and performing talents of all time. A NATURAL WOMAN chronicles King’s extraordinary life, drawing readers into her musical world, including her phenomenally successful #1 album Tapestry, and into her journey as a performer, mother, wife and present-day activist. Deeply personal, King’s long-awaited memoir offers readers a front-row seat to the woman behind the legend.

The book will include dozens of photos from King’s childhood, her own family, and behind-the-scenes images from her performances.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Carole King

Carole King had her first No. 1 hit in 1961, at age 18, with “Will You Love Me Tomorrow”. Collaborating with former husband Gerry Goffin, the team went on to write more than two dozen chart-toppers, including “One Fine Day”, “The Loco-Motion”, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow”, and “(You Me Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman.” Her 1971 solo-album, Tapesty, won 4 Grammys, and earned her the record for longest time an album by a female artist has remained on the Billboard Charts (6 years), as well as the longest time holding the #1 position (15 consecutive weeks).

King, in addition to writing more than 100 top-selling songs has recorded 25 solo albums. In 2007 she and longtime collaborator James Taylor reunited and recorded Live at the Troubadour. Released in 2010 the album debuted at number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and The Troubadour Reunion Tour became the second highest grossing Tour of that year. She has won numerous lifetime achievement honors and has been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, “Hit Parade” Hall of Fame, and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Carole King continues to entertain audiences the world over. She released her most recent album in December, 2011, Carole King: A Holiday Carole, to rave reviews.

Editorial Review

When King embarked on her Living Room Tour in 2004, she re-created onstage the atmosphere that millions had come to expect from the slew of albums she recorded from the 1970s onward. Tapestry, her breakthrough 1971 album, not only became a bestseller and a benchmark for women’s achievements in the music industry but also introduced the down-to-earth, optimistic and liberated worldview of a woman with some timely stories to tell. King’s trajectory mirrored that of many of her fellow musical peers. Bitten by the music bug at an early age and subsequently converted to rock ’n’ roll in the ’50s, she began writing her own songs, landing a record deal at the age of 15. She would experience far greater success, however, when she and co-songwriter Gerry Goffin turned out hit after hit for such artists as Aretha Franklin, the Shirelles and the Monkees. Having married Goffin when she was 17, King spent most of the ’60s balancing her career with her responsibilities as a wife and mother. Change was in the air, though, and when her marriage deteriorated, she set off for Los Angeles to seek her own voice. That voice comes through strongly on every page of this memoir, an engaging assortment of recollections comprising a journey that started in her working-class Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, took her to Manhattan and Laurel Canyon and saw her escape what Joni Mitchell called “the star maker machinery” to settle in rural Idaho. In one of the book’s best sections, King explains her decision to retreat from fame in the mid ’70s, chronicling the joys and sorrows of going “back to the land” as well as the tempestuous relationships she had with two men during this period. She is also refreshingly candid about her four marriages. – Kirkus Reviews

Carole King, From Doo-Wopper To Chart Topper

NPR Book Review – April 10, 2102 (Excerpt)

Carole King has an armful of Grammy Awards and countless Top 10 hits, both under her own name and as a songwriter for artists from Little Eva to the Monkees to Aretha Franklin.

Her solo album Tapestry spent 15 weeks at the top of the charts, becoming one of the biggest-selling records of all time. King managed to fit in all those hits by starting very, very young. She tells NPR’s Renee Montagne that she was just 15 when she and some classmates formed a doo-wop group called the Co-Sines.

“We got the name off our math book,” King says. The Co-Sines never made it big, but in just a few months, King was working as a professional songwriter, thanks to some advice from the famous disc jockey Alan Freed.

“He told me to … open the phone book and look up record companies and get appointments and go play my stuff for them,” King says. “And no, you can’t do that anymore. At that time, the record industry was established, but record executives were actively looking for acts that would resonate with teenagers. And there weren’t a lot of them out there, so the doors were wide open.” [Read the full article...]

For Carole King, Songwriting Is A ‘Natural’ Talent

NPR Book Review – April 11, 2012 (Excerpt)

Carole King initially found it extremely difficult to navigate the social hierarchies of high school. The Grammy Award-winning songwriter was a few years younger than her fellow classmates and was often dismissed as being “cute.”

“And it was like, no, I don’t want to be cute, I want to be beautiful and smart,” she tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “And that wasn’t happening, and then I connected through music. So music became a way of identifying my particular niche. How lucky for me.”

King, a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, has written for everyone from Little Eva to Aretha Franklin to James Taylor. Her 1971 solo album Tapestry spent 15 weeks at the top of the charts, and stayed on the charts for more than six years. [Read the full article...]

Review: Carole King reveals the story behind ‘A Natural Woman’

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – April 25, 2012 (Excerpt)

My favorite scene in Carole King’s long-awaited “A Natural Woman” comes near the beginning — appropriately, since the teen hitmaker was the epitome of an early starter. The high school student born Carol Klein had just signed a recording contract with ABC-Paramount. She was attending her first session as a guest when her host Don Costa, the conductor of the session’s orchestra, had to leave the room. King had never held a baton nor read a score before, but she stepped to the podium and, at age 15, proceeded to lead the room of professional musicians.

Multiple Grammy winner, Diamond recording artist and member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Carole King has earned that overused label: a living legend. Such classics as “Up on the Roof,” “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” “I Feel the Earth Move” and “You’ve Got a Friend” epitomize the concept of the well-written pop song. And they are mere samples from a catalog whose earnings could probably rescue Greece from debt. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

For almost half a century, Bob Dylan has been a primary catalyst in rock’s shifting sensibilities. Few American artists are as important, beloved, and endlessly examined, yet he remains something of an enigma. Who, we ask, is the “real” Bob Dylan? Is he Bobby Zimmerman, yearning to escape Hibbing, Minnesota, or the Woody Guthrie wannabe playing Greenwich Village haunts? Folk Messiah, Born-Again Bob, Late-Elvis Dylan, Jack Fate, or Living National Treasure? In Who Is That Man?, David Dalton—cultural historian, journalist, screenwriter, and novelist—paints a revealing portrait of the rock icon, ingeniously exposing the three-card monte games he plays with his persona.

Guided by Dalton’s cutting-edge insights and myth-debunking point of view, Who Is That Man? follows Dylan’s imaginative life, integrating actual events with Dylan’s words and those of the people who know him most intimately. Drawing upon Dylan’s friends and fellow eyewitnesses—including Marianne Faithfull, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Stampfel , Larry “Ratso” Sloman, Eric Andersen, Nat Hentoff, Andrew Oldham, Nat Finkelstein, and others—this book will provide a new perspective on the man, the myth, and the musical era that forged them both.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Book review: “Who is That Man?” by David Dalton

The Washington Post Book Review – April 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

The conjurer’s art is a tricky one, all the more so when that sleight of hand is brought to bear on an individual’s identity. Bob Dylan has been rock music’s resident shape-shifter for more than 50 years now, replacing one persona with another, as fans, scholars, pop culture mavens and chat-room habitues make their case for the version of Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minn., that best encompasses all the others. Veteran biographer David Dalton has taken a more involved approach than we’re used to seeing as he sifts through each successive, mounting image of a man who doesn’t so much resemble someone you might pass on the street as he does a living, breathing construct, a superimposition of selves, lies, truths and lies that beget truths.

Dylan’s history, such as he designed it, resembles a great mash-up of literary styles: tall tales, farce, the picturesque, the picaresque, the road saga, the surrealist internal monologue. It all goes into the hopper, just as folk, rock, blues, Tin Pan Alley and cabaret went into the music. As Dalton notes early on, if you’re going to understand Dylan, you need to recognize that everything is mutable in his world, and often inverted. “His fabrications are the most profound, interesting, and authentic part of his personality,” Dalton writes. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

America’s most beguiling metropolis started out as a snake-infested, hurricane-battered swamp. Through intense imperial rivalries and ambitious settlers who risked their lives to succeed in colonial America, the site became a crossroads for the Atlantic world. Powell gives us the full sweep of the city’s history from its founding through statehood.

About Lawrence N. Powell

Lawrence N. Powell holds the James H. Clark Endowed Chair in American Civilization and is Director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University.

Editorial Reviews

There are bigger cities than New Orleans, more beautiful cities than New Orleans, and more important cities than New Orleans but there is no city more interesting than New Orleans. This is a fascinating book about a fascinating city.
–James Carville

A masterful unfolding of the story of the most complicated and unusual city in the United States. This will become the definitive book on the early history of not only New Orleans but much of the Gulf Coast.
–John M. Barry, author of Rising Tide and Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul

The Accidental City is a tour de force–engagingly written, broad in scope, precise in detail, and completely worthy of its fascinating, complex, soulful subject.
–Tom Piazza, author of Why New Orleans Matters and City of Refuge

An epic account of how America’s most exotic city crept and clawed its way into existence. Powell evokes the swamps, sweat, misery, grandeur, and colorful and seedy characters that came together to create a place that Thomas Jefferson could never comprehend. –Joseph J. Ellis, author of American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans” by Lawrence N. Powell

The Washington Post Book Review – March 30, 2012 (Excerpt)

“Long in the back of my mind was the thought of one day tackling a history of New Orleans,” Lawrence N. Powell writes, but Hurricane Katrina pushed him to turn possibility into reality. The calamitous storm of 2005 forced him “to think differently about the city,” offended as he was by “all those promiscuous statements about how my adopted hometown should be allowed to slide back into the primordial ooze.” People who knew little or nothing about New Orleans were asking: “Why rebuild a sinking metropolis on a site that shouldn’t have been selected in the first place?” Powell found the question “hurtful” but agreed that it “deserved a respectful answer.”

So now we have what Powell calls “a stab at an honest answer.” It is in fact a great deal more than that. Powell, who holds an endowed chair in history at Tulane University, has written in “The Accidental City” what should stand for years as the definitive history of New Orleans’s first century, the period that he regards as central to the city’s formation and its character. His study covers the time from its establishment in the famous southern crescent of the Mississippi River in the early 18th century to its sale by Napoleon to the United States, as part of the Louisiana Purchase, in 1803. Powell rounds out its century with a brief account of Andrew Jackson’s stunning victory over the British in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, “a watershed in the young nation’s history . . . chiefly because the victory established once and for all that the United States was no longer a colony — not even in feeling, let alone in fact.” [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Musician and naturalist Bernie Krause is one of the world’s leading experts in natural sound, and he’s spent his life discovering and recording nature’s rich chorus. Searching far beyond our modern world’s honking horns and buzzing machinery, he has sought out the truly wild places that remain, where natural soundscapes exist virtually unchanged from when the earliest humans first inhabited the earth.

Krause shares fascinating insight into how deeply animals rely on their aural habitat to survive and the damaging effects of extraneous noise on the delicate balance between predator and prey. But natural soundscapes aren’t vital only to the animal kingdom; Krause explores how the myriad voices and rhythms of the natural world formed a basis from which our own musical expression emerged.

From snapping shrimp, popping viruses, and the songs of humpback whales-whose voices, if unimpeded, could circle the earth in hours-to cracking glaciers, bubbling streams, and the roar of intense storms; from melody-singing birds to the organlike drone of wind blowing over reeds, the sounds Krause has experienced and describes are like no others. And from recording jaguars at night in the Amazon rain forest to encountering mountain gorillas in Africa’s Virunga Mountains, Krause offers an intense and intensely personal narrative of the planet’s deep and connected natural sounds and rhythm.

The Great Animal Orchestra is the story of one man’s pursuit of natural music in its purest form, and an impassioned case for the conservation of one of our most overlooked natural resources-the music of the wild.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Bernie Krause

Dr. Bernie Krause is both a musician and a naturalist. During the 1950s and ’60s, he devoted himself to music and replaced Pete Seeger as the guitarist for the Weavers. For more than forty years, Krause has traveled the world, recording and archiving the sounds of creatures and environments large and small. He has recorded more than fifteen thousand species and four thousand hours of wild soundscapes, over half of which no longer exist in nature, due to encroaching noise and human activity. Krause and his wife, Katherine, live in California.

Editorial Reviews

“Krause’s musical expertise allows him to hear the orchestral layering of different species in each biophony, an insight that explains group vocalization as an evolutionary survival mechanism rather than a purposeful chorus of noise.” (Publishers Weekly)

“The Great Animal Orchestra speaks to us of an ancient music to which so many of us are deaf. Bernie Krause is, above all, an artist. I have watched him recording the calls of chimpanzees, the singing of the insects and birds, and seen his deep love for the harmonies of nature. In this book he helps us to hear and appreciate the often hidden musicians in a new way. But he warns that these songs, an intrinsic part of the natural world and essential to human well being, are vanishing, one by one, snuffed out by human actions. Read The Great Animal Orchestra, tell your friends about it. And as Bernie urges, let us all do our part to preserve the age old sounds of nature.” (Jane Goodall)

“This fascinating book awakens our ancient ears to the source of all music. Read it, and you’ll yearn to muffle our din-and hear anew.” (author of The World Without Us Alan Weisman)

Exploring Earth tones in ‘The Great Animal Orchestra’

The Washington Post Book Review – March 23, 2012 (Excerpt)

Bernie Krause might be the Zelig of 20th-century electronic music. Run your finger down the back of LP jackets from the ’60s, squint hard, and you’re likely to find Krause’s name popping up in small print on all sorts of albums. If you were a musician who wanted a shot of techno-gimmickry from that decade’s newest toy — the Moog synthesizer — chances are, you’d have hired Krause. The Doors and the Byrds did. Or if you were a filmmaker who wanted a certain effect that only electronic gadgetry could summon, you might have put him on your payroll. Those slow-mo helicopter whumps in the opening scenes of “Apocalypse Now” were brought to you in part by Krause.

But Krause’s latest book, “The Great Animal Orchestra,” might come as a surprise. Since completing a doctorate in bio-acoustics more than three decades ago, Krause has become one of the world’s most outspoken — and unusual — environmentalists. Part anthropologist, part technician, part musician, he lugs his recording equipment around the globe, seeking to capture the vanishing soundscapes of our rapidly changing Earth. If you ever wanted to hear ants sing, beavers cry or corn grow, Krause’s your man. His book movingly conveys his anger at the unseen toll that human-generated noise has exacted on the natural world — and why this matters. [Read the full article...]

Earth Music - ‘The Great Animal Orchestra,’ by Bernie Krause

The New York Times Book Review – April 12, 2012 (Excerpt)

Instead of visiting the zoo, spend some time in the native habitat of your local symphony orchestra. You will meet the badgering bass player, whose disparaging wisecracks you cannot quite hear; the flustered, quivering flutist who just wishes the oboist would play in tune (the feeling is mutual); and many other creatures, docile and gruff. Bernie Krause’s new book, “The Great Animal Orchestra,” is not about this beastly symphony; it is about the symphony of beasts that surrounds us, a vast orchestra in the process of being silenced, perhaps even more endangered than our human animal orchestras.

Krause’s term for this symphony is “biophony”: the sound of all living organisms except us. He is a man with a calling. After a stint with the Weavers (he replaced Pete Seeger), a foray into electronic music and some not-too-surprising drug use, by “Hardyesque chance” he ended up in the Muir Woods recording nature sounds for an album. Now he is high on hippo grunts and insect drones, having spent decades recording and archiving wild soundscapes. He chronicles his life choices and epiphanies, guides us through nature’s sonic treasures, makes interesting assertions about the musicianship of animals (human and nonhuman), and begs us to pay attention. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Rick Moody has been writing about music as long as he has been writing, and this book provides an ample selection from that output. His anatomy of the word cool reminds us that, in the postwar 40s, it was infused with the feeling of jazz music but is now merely a synonym for neat. “On Celestial Music,” which was included in Best American Essays, 2008, begins with a lament for the loss in recent music of the vulnerability expressed by Otis Redding’s masterpiece, “Try a Little Tenderness;” moves on to Moody’s infatuation with the ecstatic music of the Velvet Underground; and ends with an appreciation of Arvo Part and Purcell, close as they are to nature, “the music of the spheres.”

Contemporary groups covered include Magnetic Fields (their love songs), Wilco (the band’s and Jeff Tweedy’s evolution), Danielson Famile (an evangelical rock band), The Pogues (Shane McGowan’s problems with addiction), The Lounge Lizards (John Lurie’s brilliance), and Meredith Monk, who once recorded a song inspired by Rick Moody’s story “Boys.” Always both incisive and personable, these pieces inspire us to dive as deeply into the music that enhances our lives as Moody has done–and introduces us to wonderful sounds we may not know.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Rick Moody

Rick Moody is the author of nine books. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, NY.

Editorial Review

Moody (The Four Fingers of Death, 2010, etc.) is also a musician of semi-pro status, with a couple of albums by his group the Wingdale Community Singers and a solo set under his belt. This collection of his writing about music for various journals is characterized by passion, inspired insight and a generous sampling of warm humor. The essays cover an astonishing amount of genre ground. Moody’s catholic tastes run the gamut from rock to left-field experimental sounds, and he’s a sensitive listener who almost always connects with the heart of the matter. He tackles the challenges of writing about the most fundamental of human emotions as he carves a playlist out of the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs; explores the expression of spirituality in the work of the evangelistic rock group the Danielson Famile; ponders what music in Heaven might sound like in the title story, which springs off a live recording by Otis Redding; muses on the affect of the Pogues’ music, viewed through the prism of lead singer Shane McGowan’s alcoholism; and excoriates the soullessness of modern European pop in a tart and frequently hilarious jeremiad about the drum machine. Some chapters are less satisfying: Moody’s account of two weeks at a New York music camp is essentially a journal entry, while a survey of the fin de siècle New York underground reads like exactly what it is: a chapter from an as-yet-unpublished textbook. But most of the writing is acute and intensely wrought. It’s often highly personal stuff—Moody weaves his parents’ divorce, his struggles with alcohol and his performance experiences into the mix—but it never succumbs to the solipsism so prevalent in much latter-day rock criticism. For Moody, music is most of all about rapture, and he communicates his feelings with an ardor and intelligence all too rare in these waning days of music criticism. – Kirkus Reviews

Riffs On Riffs: Rick Moody’s ‘Adventures in Listening’

NPR Book Review – March 21, 2012 (Excerpt)

“There’s something about a naive apprehension of art that makes it that much nobler to me,” Rick Moody observes in “Two Weeks at Music Camp,” one of 13 essays collected inOn Celestial Music. He’s at an artist colony, listening to the history of a few sculptures — and finding himself profoundly indifferent. “I care about the work,” he writes, not its origins.

But if you care about the work, you can’t help but examine its background and try to make sense of its technique. Partly because art stimulates the mind, and partly because people like to share what turns them on. And so, in this book, Moody — the novelist, but also sometime musician (he wrestles with this identification in these pages) and voracious listener — goes all in. So much so that his sheer interpretive doggedness — on full display in his essays on Wilco, Peter Townshend and the Magnetic Fields — might exhaust rather than pique the reader’s interest.

The material Moody addresses isn’t for everyone: It tilts toward rock and the avant-garde; it highlights New York (where Moody lives); it is mostly — save some heartfelt but brief digressions into jazz and hip-hop, and cursory name-checking of “world music” greats — white. It has biases: Moody can’t abide the music of the 1980s; he explains his revulsion — at length — in the final essay, a florid polemic titled “Europe, Forsake Your Drum Machines!” [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

On the eve of his 40th birthday, Gary Marcus, a renowned scientist with no discernible musical talent, learns to play the guitar and investigates how anyone—of any age —can become musical. Do you have to be born musical to become musical? Do you have to start at the age of six?

Using the tools of his day job as a cognitive psychologist, Gary Marcus becomes his own guinea pig as he takes up the guitar. In a powerful and incisive look at how both children and adults become musical, Guitar Zero traces Marcus’s journey, what he learned, and how anyone else can learn, too. A groundbreaking peek into the origins of music in the human brain, this musical journey is also an empowering tale of the mind’s enduring plasticity.

Marcus investigates the most effective ways to train body and brain to learn to play an instrument, in a quest that takes him from Suzuki classes to guitar gods. From deliberate and efficient practicing techniques to finding the right music teacher, Marcus translates his own experience—as well as reflections from world-renowned musicians—into practical advice for anyone hoping to become musical, or to learn a new skill.

Guitar Zero debunks the popular theory of an innate musical instinct while simultaneously challenging the idea that talent is only a myth. While standing the science of music on its head, Marcus brings new insight into humankind’s most basic question: what counts as a life well lived? Does one have to become the next Jimi Hendrix to make a passionate pursuit worthwhile, or can the journey itself bring the brain lasting satisfaction?

For all those who have ever set out to play an instrument—or wish that they could—Guitar Zero is an inspiring and fascinating look at the pursuit of music, the mechanics of the mind, and the surprising rewards that come from following one’s dreams.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Gary Marcus

Gary Marcus studies evolution, language, and cognitive development at New York University, where he is a professor of psychology and the director of the NYU Center for Child Language. The editor of the Norton Psychology Reader and author of three books about the origins and development of mind and brain, Marcus has written articles for The New York Times, Wired, Discover, and The Wall Street Journal, and has appeared on radio and television programs around the globe.

Editorial Reviews

“Marcus is one of the smartest psychologists around, a deep thinker and an eloquent writer, and the story he tells is informed by the best science of perception and learning and evolution, talent and effort, genius and frustration and success. If you have ever dreamed of becoming a musician, you simply must read GUITAR ZERO.” - Paul Bloom, author of How Pleasure Works

“I enjoyed GUITAR ZERO immensely. Marcus has not only intensified the process itself but simplified the definition of one”s dedication to it. His elaborate illustration will certainly cause many of us to better appreciate the gifts we”ve been blessed with.” - Pat Martino, four-time Grammy nominee

“A delightfully inspiring, charming, and detailed musical journey that explodes myths of human limitation, while revealing that the fountain of youth very well may be made of wood and played on six strings.” - Richard Barone, musician, author of Frontman

“Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning” by Gary Marcus

The Washington Post Book Review – March 16, 2012 (Excerpt)

As a teenager, Gary Marcus wanted to be a scientist. Two decades later, as a professor of cognitive psychology at New York University, he wanted to learn to play the guitar. And, more important, he wanted to understand how he was learning it.

In “Guitar Zero,” Marcus uses his musical midlife crisis to frame a discussion of the science of adult learning and music’s effect on the human brain. For the past couple of decades, developmental psychologists have believed that complex skills, such as playing an instrument, are best acquired during brief windows of time, usually in early childhood, when the brain is more malleable.

or Marcus, now 42, this fertile musical moment had long since passed, and with it, his rock-and-roll dreams. But “Guitar Hero” — a video game in which players hold a plastic guitar and tap buttons in time to classic rock anthems — convinced him otherwise. He struggled at first but eventually got the knack. And so, with the aid of a few instruction books, some private lessons, a handful of consultants from the six-string Mount Olympus (Pat Metheney, Smokey Hormel) and a trip to rock camp, Marcus took on an actual instrument. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Widow With Shawl (A Porttrait)

Lyrics And Music by Donovan P. Leitch

Dear wind that shakes the barley free
Blow home my true love’s ship to me, fill the sail
I a-weary wait upon the shore

Forsake her not in times of storm
Protect her oaken beams from harm, fill her sail
I a-weary wait upon the shore

Whether he be in Africa
Or deep asleep in India, fill his dreams
I a-weary wait upon the shore

Dear snow, white gulls upon the wave
I, like you, am lamenting, for my love
I a-weary cry upon the shore

And in my chariot of sleep
I ride the vast and dreamy deep, deep sea
I awake a-weary on the shore

Seven years and seven days
No man has seen my woman ways, dear God
I a-weary cry upon the shore

Along the shingled beach I go
The wind about me as I make my way
To my weary dream upon my bed

Dear wind that shakes the barley free
Blow home my true love’s ship to me, fill the sail
I a-weary wait upon the shore

Parking available in the lots to the rear of the hall and on the street. Homemade desserts and baked goods sold, along with sodas, coffee, teas, and water. CDs sold by the artists on site.

Feelin’ All Cooped Up?

Then come celebrate the almost-end-of-winter with us at our annual “All Cooped Up” concert at the St. James Coffeehouse on March 23, 2012.

Hear music by Coopsters of all kinds from bluegrass to swing and everything in between.

Coop Concerts is a not for profit collective of musicians and music lovers who share creativity through live performances, music education, peer networking and promoting Franklin County as a hub of live music.

Doors open at 6:30

Acts will be announced soon!

For more information see http://www.coopconcerts.org/

More information about the Saint James Coffeehouse is available at the Coffeehouse Facebook Site. Click here for directions to Saint James.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

]]> http://frogenyozurt.com/2012/03/greenfield-massachusetts-st-james-coffeehouse-to-host-coop-concerts-march-23-2012/feed/ 0 http://frogenyozurt.com/2012/02/liebestod-opera-buffa-with-leib-goldkorn-by-leslie-epstein/ http://frogenyozurt.com/2012/02/liebestod-opera-buffa-with-leib-goldkorn-by-leslie-epstein/#comments Sat, 18 Feb 2012 13:02:38 +0000 Editor http://frogenyozurt.com/?p=28747

A multilayered masterpiece of fevered imagination and eroticism, Liebestod soars as the consummate work by one of America’s greatest comic geniuses.

As hilarious as it is heartbreaking, Liebestod returns us to Leslie Epstein’s most compelling literary character, that European émigré and meagerly successful musician, Leib Goldkorn, whose final years as a randy centenarian in New York City end in one of the most memorable swan songs in recent fiction. Invited back to his hometown in Moravia, Leib discovers that his father is not a hops magnate but actually one of the twentieth century’s greatest composers, Gustav Mahler. Returning to New York with a bevy of rabbinical cousins, Leib, now besotted by a world-famed diva, is determined to bring to the Metropolitan Opera Rubezahl, the only opera his real father ever wrote. Yet the much-heralded premiere turns into a fiasco of unimaginable proportions, all breathtakingly relayed by a stunned newspaper correspondent who survives to report on this monumental disaster. With Liebestod, Epstein once again “illuminates the mystery of our common humanity and mortality” (New York Times).

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Leslie Epstein

Leslie Epstein has written eight books of fiction including King of the Jews, San Remo Drive, and Pandemonium and won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Achievement in Literature for his creation of Leib Goldkorn. The director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University, he lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Old Scores - ‘Liebestod,’ Leslie Epstein’s New Operatic Farce

The New York Times Book Review – February 17, 2012 (Excerpt)

“Liebestod” is the latest in Leslie Epstein’s series of “buffa” — or farcical — works of fiction about Leib Goldkorn, who serves here as both bumbling protagonist and fumbling narrator. The grandiosely unreliable Leib believes he’s the son of Gustav Mahler; the onetime inamorato of Sonja Henie, Carmen Miranda and Esther Williams; and now, at 104, the heartthrob of Renée Fleming. Despite Leib’s associations with the famous, you may be unfamiliar with his earlier adventures in collections of novellas called “Goldkorn Tales” and “Ice Fire Water.” “To not worry,” as this syntax-strangler would say. In “Liebestod,” Epstein fills in the background by returning his quixotic hero to the Czech town where he grew up and by detailing how Leib escaped the Holocaust, which swallowed up his family.

Unfamiliarity with previous Goldkorn stories may even be an advantage when reading “Liebestod,” since you won’t realize how thoroughly it extends to book length the formula already explored in the novellas: earnest Leib tumbles into life-threatening melodramatic messes with an assortment of unlikely celebrities. This time they include George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Elie Wiesel and other luminaries attending the 2006 premiere of a Mahler opera that Leib, an agonizingly incompetent musician, translates and attempts to conduct at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. [Read the full article...]

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QUEEN OF MISFORTUNE
A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Shakespearean Dimension!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same strange who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

The beautiful and tragic saga of the Louvin Brothers—one of the most legendary country duos of all time—is one of America’s great untold stories. Charlie Louvin was a good, god-fearing, churchgoing singer, but his brother Ira had the devil in him, and was known for smashing his mandolin to splinters onstage, cussing out Elvis Presley, and trying to strangle his third wife with a telephone cord. Satan is Real is the incredible tale of Charlie Louvin’s sixty-five-year career, the timeless murder ballads of the Louvin Brothers, and an epic tale of two brothers bound together by love, hate, alcohol, blood, and music.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Charlie Louvin

Born in Henagar, Alabama, Charlie Louvin recorded from 1947 to 1962 with his brother Ira as the Louvin Brothers. In 1955, they became members of the Grand Ole Opry and churned out thirteen hits on the Billboard country chart, including “When I Stop Dreaming,” “Cash on the Barrelhead,” and “Knoxville Girl.” Charlie’s solo career began in 1964 with the top five hit “I Don’t Love You Anymore,” and he followed it with twenty-nine Billboard-charting singles and four Grammy nominations.

Editorial Review

Ira and Charlie Louvin were the last of the great harmony duos; in the ’50s they launched a string of songs up the country charts and starred on Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. Here, Charlie (1927–2011) recounts the twosome’s rise from hardscrabble beginnings in Alabama’s cotton country to national fame. Basically self-taught, the brothers were reared on church singing before they launched an uphill professional career in the ’40s. Louvin maps the pair’s arduous journey through small-town radio gigs and endless regional touring, with flavorful, often profanely sketched observations about the hardships of making it on the road as a rising country act. Major music publisher Fred Rose took the Louvins under his wing, but after a pair of failed record deals, the brothers were ready to pack it in when they were signed to Capitol Records in the early ’50s. Starting in gospel, they reached the top with secular hits like “When I Start Dreaming” and classic albums like Tragic Songs of Life. The second half of the book focuses on reckless elder brother Ira, a pugnacious, womanizing alcoholic whose violence led his third wife to shoot him six times (he survived). In the face of Ira’s escalating madness, Charlie finally broke up the act in the early ’60s, and Ira was killed in a 1965 road accident. Charlie never manages to put his finger on what drove his brother to such heights of destructive behavior, but he still paints a chilling portrait of a brilliant musician intent on self-annihilation. Along the way, he offers entertaining cameo renderings of such stars as Elvis Presley, Roy Acuff, Johnny Cash, Bill Monroe, George Jones and Kris Kristofferson. The self-effacing Louvin dispenses with his solo work and latter-day career revival in a couple of brief chapters. Deep analysis is not his strong suit, but his amusing, prickly voice animates the book. – Kirkus Reviews

Two-Part Harmony - ‘Satan Is Real,’ the Story of the Louvin Brothers

The New York Times Book Review – February 17, 2012 (Excerpt)

By Charlie Louvin’s own account, people who saw the Louvin Brothers perform were mystified by the experience. Ira Louvin was a full head taller than his younger brother, played the mandolin like Bill Monroe and sang in an impossibly high, tense, quivering tenor. Charlie strummed a guitar, grinned like a vaudevillian and handled the bottom register. But every so often, in the middle of a song, some hidden signal flashed and the brothers switched places — with Ira swooping down from the heights, and Charlie angling upward — and even the most careful listeners would lose track of which man was carrying the lead. This was more than close-harmony singing; each instance was an act of transubstantiation. “It baffled a lot of people,” Charlie Louvin explains in his crackling new memoir. “We could change in the middle of a word. Part of the reason we could do that was that we’d learned to have a good ear for other people’s voices when we sang Sacred Harp. But the other part is that we were brothers.”

Ira died in a car wreck in 1965. Charlie — who rolled his first cigarette at the age of 5 — died last year at 83, just two months after talking the book out. (The contributions of his co-author, Benjamin Whitmer, are pretty much invisible, which makes them difficult to praise, and all the more praiseworthy.) True to his subtitle, Charlie tells Ira’s story, as well as his own, devoting 47 chapters to their shared lives and careers, and just three more to the years that followed Ira’s death. He is profane, piquant and brutally honest in ways that are sure to offend the country music establishment but might have delighted Ira, who was no less of a demon than the ones the Louvins — who cut their teeth as a gospel duo, and never really left the church behind — so often sang about. [Read the full article...]

The Sabina Strong Series Continues – Vampire’s Trill

Lorelei Bell has created another unique and mesmerizing mystery masterwork that tops its prequel Vampire Ascending in drama, fast-paced action, love, passion, heartache, and devastation. New friends, new adventures, shocking revelations, and harrowing experiences make for riveting reading in this second installment of the Sabrina Strong Series. Sabrina learns more details – through Vasyl’s recounting of his human and vampire life – of what her role as a sibyl means and how the past and the future will come together. She finally learns what role Vasyl has played in his search for the next sibyl and why she is so tremendously important. [Read more...]

Vampire’s Trill is available at Amazon.Com – including the Kindle Version, Barnes & Noble – including the Nook Version, and any other good bookstores.

Also available in the United Kingdom at Amazon.co.uk including the Kindle version.

As Whitney Houston approaches her 40th birthday, this biography reflects on the journey which has taken her from a problematic childhood in a broken New Jersey home, to becoming the protegee of Arista producer Clive Davis, to today’s diva, mired in rumours of peculiar behaviour and drug abuse. He explains how the shy, pretty young girl from a devoutly religious background, once dubbed the “Prom Queen of Soul”, turned into the subject of lurid tabloid gossip, much of it concerning her often turbulent relationship with her husband, hiphop star Bobby Brown. Despite a string of highly publicized episodes of violence, adultery and substance abuse, Bobby still holds a strange attraction for Whitney, who insists “I’ve got a good man. He takes care of me”. This biography tells the whole story of Whitney Houston’s dramatic and turbulent life.

About James Robert Parish

James Robert Parish is the author of many biographies and reference books on the entertainment industry, including The Hollywood Book of Death and Hollywood Divas.

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Whitney Elizabeth Houston (August 9, 1963 – February 11, 2012) was an American singer, actress, producer, and model. In 2009, the Guinness World Records cited her as the most-awarded female act of all time. Her list of awards includes two Emmy Awards, six Grammy Awards, 30 Billboard Music Awards, 22 American Music Awards, among a total of 415 career awards as of 2010. Houston was also one of the world’s best-selling music artists, having sold over 170 million albums, singles and videos worldwide. Inspired by prominent soul singers in her family, including her mother Cissy Houston, cousins Dionne Warwick and Dee Dee Warwick, and her godmother Aretha Franklin, Houston began singing with New Jersey church’s junior gospel choir at age 11. After she began performing alongside her mother in night clubs in the New York City area, she was discovered by Arista Records label head Clive Davis. Houston released seven studio albums and three movie soundtrack albums, all of which have diamond, multi-platinum, platinum or gold certification.

Houston was the only artist to chart seven consecutive No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 hits (“Saving All My Love for You”, “How Will I Know”, “Greatest Love of All”, “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)”, “Didn’t We Almost Have It All”, “So Emotional” and “Where Do Broken Hearts Go”). She was the second artist behind Elton John and the only female artist to have two number-one Billboard 200Album awards (formerly “Top Pop Album”) on the Billboard magazine year-end charts. Houston’s 1985 debut album Whitney Houston, became the best-selling debut album by a female act at the time of its release. The album was named Rolling Stone‘s best album of 1986, and was ranked at number 254 on Rolling Stone‘s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Her second studio album Whitney (1987), became the first album by a female artist to debut at number one on the Billboard 200 albums chart. Houston’s crossover appeal on the popular music charts as well as her prominence on MTV, starting with her video for “How Will I Know”, influenced several African-American female artists to follow in her footsteps.

Houston’s first acting role was as the star of the feature film The Bodyguard (1992). The film’s original soundtrack won the 1994 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Its lead single “I Will Always Love You”, became the best-selling single by a female artist in music history. With the album, Houston became the first act (solo or group, male or female) to sell more than a million copies of an album within a single week period. The album makes her the only female act in the top 10 list of the best-selling albums of all time, at number four. Houston continued to star in movies and contribute to their soundtracks, including the films Waiting to Exhale (1995) and The Preacher’s Wife (1996). The Preacher’s Wife soundtrack became the best-selling gospel album in history. Three years after the release of her fourth studio album My Love Is Your Love (1998), she renewed her recording contract with Arista Records. She released her fifth studio album Just Whitney in 2002, and the Christmas-themed One Wish: The Holiday Album in 2003. In 2009, Houston released her seventh studio album I Look to You.

On February 11, 2012, Houston died of unknown causes at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. - Source: Wikipedia.org

A love song to an American icon: the first full-length biography of Carly Simon, from an acclaimed music journalist who has known her for decades

Carly Simon has won two Grammys and an Academy Award, and her albums have sold more than forty million copies. Her music has touched countless lives since her debut in the 1970s, yet her own life story has remained unpublished-until now. Tapping private archives, family interviews, and a forty-year friendship with the legend herself, Stephen Davis at last captures Carly Simon’s extraordinary journey from shy teenager to superstar. More Room in a Broken Heart candidly covers everything her fans want to know, including:

• Growing up with her father, publishing mogul Richard Simon
• The Bob Dylan turning point that launched her career
• The real story behind “You’re So Vain”
• Carly’s severe stage fright (she’s the only musical guest to pretape an SNL segment)
• Romantic involvements with Mick Jagger, Warren Beatty, and Cat Stevens
• How Carly and James Taylor went from being pop music’s reigning couple to independent souls living at opposite ends of Massachusetts
• Surviving breast cancer
• Her recent financial and spiritual crises

Along the way, Davis vividly takes readers back to some of the most powerful eras in American music history and delivers a tribute worthy of the artist and her loyal fans, who know that nobody does it better than Carly Simon.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Stephen Davis

Stephen Davis’s many acclaimed books include the Rolling Stones history Old Gods Almost Dead as well as the New York Times bestsellers Walk This Way (with Aerosmith), Fleetwood (with Mick Fleetwood), and the Led Zeppelin history Hammer of the Gods.

Editorial Review

Journalist and self-described fan Davis (LZ-’75: The Lost Chronicles of Led Zeppelin’s 1975 American Tour, 2010, etc.) provides an unauthorized but intimate glimpse into the life of a musical icon. The daughter of publishing mogul Richard L. Simon (co-founder of Simon & Schuster), Carly grew up in a household filled with American royalty, including composer George Gershwin and baseball icon Jackie Robinson. The guests were representative of Carly and her father’s two shared interests, music and baseball, the former of which encouraged at least two Simon sisters to enter the music business. Yet beneath the family’s star-studded exterior remained many deeply rooted problems, including the Simon parents’ infidelities, creating what Carly later described as an “atmosphere of erotica.” While music remains the focus of Davis’ book, the author pays equal attention to the tabloid-like details of the Simon family’s home life, as well as some of Carly’s better-known love affairs, including her 9-year marriage to fellow musician James Taylor. Simon’s tumultuous marriage to the drug-addicted Taylor—which produced two children but ended in divorce—provides the fodder for much of the latter half of the book. Told in strict chronological fashion, Davis’ straightforward reporting accurately recounts Simon’s surface story but will leave some readers questioning just what complexities might linger beneath the surface. – Kirkus Reviews

‘More Room in a Broken Heart,’ a biography of Carly Simon by Stephen Davis

The Washington Post Book Review – February 9, 2012 (Excerpt)

In the early 1970s, Carly Simon’s songs were like letters from an impossibly cool older sister — confiding about the fault lines in our parents’ marriages, dishing the dirt on that famous jerk she’d dated, reassuring us that she’d had her heart broken, too, but had moved on to something, someone, much better.

In his new biography, “More Room in a Broken Heart,” Stephen Davis reveals the fault lines in the life of an artist who, despite her popular success, has never received the critical respect accorded other singer-songwriters of her generation. The author of numerous bios of pop music stalwarts, Davis is probably best known for “Hammer of the Gods,” about Led Zeppelin. Simon’s adventures are more restrained than that band’s debaucheries, if, at times, equally eyebrow-raising.

Simon’s maternal grandmother was rumored to be the illegitimate daughter of a Moroccan maid and a member of the Spanish royal family. At 15, Simon’s mother, Andrea, dropped out of school and for several years worked at posh department stores. In 1933, she got a job behind the switchboard at Manhattan publisher Simon & Schuster, where she caught co-founder Richard Simon’s eye. The two married, raising their four children in New York City while summering at a bucolic compound in Stamford, Conn. Pete Seeger taught music to Carly’s West Village kindergarten. George Gershwin and Benny Goodman were family friends, and Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein performed after dinner. [Read the full article...]

VAMPIRE ASCENDING
by Lorelei Bell

Exciting Hunt For A Vampire Serial Killer in Chicago

Sabrina Strong is a Touch Clairvoyant who knows a secret. She knows her mother was turned into a vampire when Sabrina was ten. Now that she is grown up, a powerful magnate in the Chicago business world hires her to reveal the identity of who relentlessly murders vampires in his ultra-modern stronghold of a hotel. [Read More...]

Vampire Ascending is now available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

The opera singer Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci was one of the most famous celebrities of the eighteenth century. Mozart and Bach both composed for him. He was nothing less than a rock star of his day, with a massive female following. He was also a castrato.

Ranging from the salons of princes and the grand opera houses of Europe to the remote hill towns of Tuscany, Helen Berry’s compelling account of the unconventional love story of the castrato and his wife offers fascinating insight into the world of opera and the history of sex and marriage in Georgian Britain. Berry vividly describes how women flocked to Tenducci’s concerts and found him irresistible. Indeed, his young singing pupil, Dorothea Maunsell, found him so irresistible that she eloped with him. A huge scandal erupted and her father persecuted them mercilessly.

Dorothea joined her husband at his concerts, achieving a status she could never have dreamed of as a respectable girl. She also wrote a sensational account of their love affair, an early example of a teenage novel. Embroiled in debt, the Tenduccis fled to Italy, and the marriage collapsed when she fell in love with another man. There followed a highly publicized and unique marriage annulment case in the London courts. Everything hinged on the status of the marriage, whether the husband was capable of consummation, and what exactly had happened to him as a small boy in a remote Italian hill village decades before.

Telling the remarkable story of Tenducci for the first time, The Castrato and His Wife is both an exhilarating read and a perceptive commentary on the meaning of marriage, one that still resonates today.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Helen Berry

Helen Berry is Reader in Early Modern History at Newcastle University. She is the author of numerous articles on the history of eighteenth-century Britain, and is the co-editor (with Elizabeth Foyster) of The Family in Early Modern England (2007). This is her second book.

Editorial Reviews

“By using classical opera and the life and loves of a prominent castrato as a lens, Berry explores the themes of romance, sex and marriage, and, more broadly, 18th-century European social life and customs. Recommended for readers who enjoy opera, classical music in general, and European history.” – Library Journal

“Writing clearly, judiciously, and sympathetically about all the dramatis personae, especially the heroic but improvident Tenducci, who retained his professional stature throughout, historian of the family Berry rescues an eighteenth-century scandal from oblivion. Utterly enthralling.” – Booklist

“Berry addresses a topic we still find mysterious, and Tenducci’s distinctive situation is surprisingly relevant to the ongoing question of what constitutes legal marriageEL An intriguing story of a castrato’s unprecedented marriage and its implications for society at large.” –Shelf Awareness

“The Castrato and His Wife” by Helen Berry

The Washington Post Book Review – January 20, 2012 (Excerpt)

In 1775, Dorothea Maunsell and her new husband, William Long Kingsman, went to court to show that they were indeed legally married. They had already had two wedding ceremonies (one in Italy, the other in England), but there was a problem: a long, public record of Dorothea already being married to opera singer Ferdinando Tenducci. Those two had eloped in 1766 and had lived as a couple in England and then Italy. But Dorothea and William went to court to argue that the earlier liaison was in fact no real marriage. Tenducci had been castrated as a boy so as to preserve his pure voice. As a eunuch, he was deemed physically and legally incapable of being married.

Helen Berry, a gifted historian with a great story to tell, relates that the intentional removal of testicles was banned by the pope in 1587, as was the marriage of eunuchs. But the surgical mutilation continued for the next two centuries because, as Berry writes, “The fully trained castrato voice epitomized everything about Baroque style — artifical, sensuous, luxurious, and exotic.” As a youngster Tenducci was singled out for his lovely voice, and “someone in authority” probably suggested that having him castrated could lead to some money for his poor family. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

This Is a Call, the first in-depth, definitive biography of Dave Grohl, tells the epic story of a singular career that includes Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, and Them Crooked Vultures. Based on ten years of original, exclusive interviews with the man himself and conversations with a legion of musical associates like Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme, DC punk legend Ian MacKaye, and Nevermind producer Butch Vig, this is Grohl’s story. He speaks candidly and honestly about Kurt Cobain, the arguments that almost tore Nirvana apart, the feuds that threatened to derail the Foo Fighters’s global success, and the dark days that almost caused him to quit music for good.

Dave Grohl has emerged as one of the most recognizable and respected musicians in the world. He is the last true hero to emerge from the American underground. This Is a Call vividly recounts this incredible rock ’n’ roll journey.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Paul Brannigan

The former editor of Kerrang! magazine, Paul Brannigan is a respected authority on the punk scene in Washington, DC, where Dave Grohl cut his teeth. He has written about Grohl for Mojo and Q magazines and lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

NeonTommy.com, 11/30/11
“[Brannigan] manages to paint a picture of the musical atmosphere that tracks Grohl’s beginnings in punk, through his place in grunge history with Nirvana and up to the Foo’s latest album, ‘Wasted Light.’ The book is filled with vivid details of the different worlds while following Grohl’s growing influence on them…Brannigan throws color into moments and sets musical scenes that you can actually hear…Brannigan knows exactly where to put in a quote and when to use his own knowledge and criticism to push the story forward. His writing has the rhythms and attitudes of the music he describes…A book worth reading for its scope as a series of snapshots of a legendary musical journey.”

New York Journal of Books, 11/29/11

“Brannigan’s biography of musician Dave Grohl and his era, reaches ambitiously out of bounds for the conventional pop bio, cradling its subject in layers of context, political and social history…Brannigan’s excellent segues, characterizations, and lyrical zip ensure This Is a Call occasionally tips but never topples under its own weight. The result is an educational and highly entertaining read…Brannigan loops a fascinating narrative around a compelling and likeable character…This is high quality, street cred music journalism, artfully meshed with undoubted musicological and cultural history grunt.”

New Music Michael, 12/6/11
“Brannigan’s book is an exceptional companion piece to the documentary, though certainly has the ability to stand alone as an extraordinary work of the history of Dave Grohl, the Foo Fighters, and Nirvana, as well as a host of other local scenes and the music world in general…Most of us already know a lot of the stories that go along with Nirvana, but certainly not to the extent, and not to the depth that Brannigan covers…if you’re a fan of Dave Grohl, the Foo Fighters, Nirvana, punk music, hell just music in general, you’ll want to get this book for yourself and dogear the pages.”

Dave Grohl: From Antsy Student to Nirvana to Foo Fighters

The New York Times Book Review – January 20, 2012 (Excerpt)

Among musicians, drummers are a breed apart. On the one hand, the drummer is the timekeeper, the one who counts off the song and keeps the other band members on the beat. On the other, the drummer sits behind everyone else and usually doesn’t write songs or sing them, so often he’s “only the ­drummer.”

Actually, Dave Grohl was in the habit of smiling and saying, “I’m only the drummer,” as a way of sidestepping conversations about the financial affairs of his most famous band, Nirvana. By all accounts, though, he’s one of the best in the business; if you look up Grohl on YouTube, you get a sense of just how good a musician he is. He’s also, according to Paul Brannigan, the Nicest Man in Rock.

That would present a problem for any biographer: it’s hard to write about nice guys. Wisely, Brannigan — a music journalist who first interviewed Grohl 15 years ago, and spoke to him both on and off the record while writing this book — fills his ­pages by turning “This Is a Call” into a rich history of recent pop music as it moves from punk and hard-core to ­grunge to indie bands, many of which, like Nirvana, ended up signing with major labels. For his part, Grohl flits in and out of this world like Candide, landing on his feet and making new friends at every turn. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

As I had written in a previous post (see: Ireland: Inishbofin – The Island Of The White Cow) we have a family connection to the island of Inishbofin off the coast of County Galway in Ireland, and two of my wife’s cousins, Geraldine and Paddy Joe King, are gifted musicians. They are also members of the Inishbofin Ceili Band, and, of course, we do have some of their recorded works at our home here in New England. I am referring specifically to their CD The Dear Little Isle, and my favorite is their rendition of the title song.

Note: The CD is only available through the Inishbofin Community Centre (see: http://www.inishbofin.com/music.html). So, if you need a copy, you need to take the ferry at the pier in Cleggan, Ireland. First of all, it is well worth the visit, and secondly, Desmond O’Halloran’s rendition of The Dear Little Isle is absolutely striking. I have heard versions from other, very talented Irish singers, but none of them reaches the great beauty of Halloran’s voice paired with an extraordinary song.

Desmond O’Halloran, who arranged and sang the song in the Inishbofin Ceili Band’s version, wrote: “I first heard this song from Johnny Joe Pheáitsín in 1983 on Inishbofin, the words of which he wrote for me.” Unfortunately, they didn’t include the lyrics in the CD’s booklet. Another resource I found even stated: “I have found zero transcriptions of this song anywhere. If you want to actually learn to sing this song, simply learn it from a fellow singer or from a recording.”

In fact, the confusion originates in the different titles used for the same song. After all, the song and its lyrics were passed from generation to generation merely through mouth-to-mouth, and there are numerous little variations. Usually known in Ireland as The Dear little Isle or There’s A Dear Little Isle, it is commonly referred to as My Own Dear Native Land. Presumably written abroad by an exile in the early to mid 20th Century, it is now accepted as traditional.

The lyrics as shown in the following represent one version, but, again, renditions may very slightly.

My Own Dear Native Land

(Traditional)

There’s a dear little isle in the Western Ocean
An island of purity, holy and grand
Whose name fills its daughters and sons with emotion
When heard on the shores of a far distant land.
It’s Ireland, God bless her, the birthplace of heroes
The home of the patriot, warrior and sage
Of bards and of chieftains whose names live in story
May they live forever on history’s page.

For I love every blade of grass, green on your mountain,
Every leaf on your tree, every rock upon your strand
I love your green hills and your murmuring fountains
I love you, acushla, my own dear native land.

You once were a proud and a glorious nation
Your name and your fame were known all o’er the world
‘Til misfortune came o’er you and sad desolation
And the emerald banner in slavery lay unfurled.
They tortured your children, despoiled your green bowers
They tried to exterminate you long, long ago
But the Irish are somehow like wild, creeping flowers
The faster you pluck them, the quicker they grow.

For I love every blade of grass, green on your mountain,
Every leaf on your tree, every rock upon your strand
I love your green hills and your murmuring fountains
I love you, acushla, my own dear native land.

Note: “acushla,” a short form of the anglicized “acushla machree,” is from “a chuisle mo chroí,” “the pulse of my heart.”

References:

• http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/
• http://mudcat.org/
• http://www.irishtune.info/

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Common has earned a reputation in the hip hop world as a conscious artist by embracing themes of love and struggle in his songs, and by sharing his own search for knowledge with his listeners. His journey toward understanding—expressed in his music and now in his roles in film and television—is rooted in his relationship with a remarkable woman, his mother, Mahalia Ann Hines.

In One Day It’ll All Make Sense, Common holds nothing back. He tells what it was like for a boy with big dreams growing up on the South Side of Chicago. He reveals how he almost quit rapping after his first album, Can I Borrow a Dollar?, sold only two thousand copies. He recounts his rise to stardom, giving a behind-the-scenes look into the recording studios, concerts, movie sets, and after-parties of a hip-hop celebrity and movie star. He reflects on his controversial invitation to perform at the White House, a story that grabbed international headlines. And he talks about the challenges of balancing fame, love, and fatherhood.

One Day It’ll All Make Sense is a gripping memoir, both provocative and funny. Common shares never-before-told stories about his encounters with everyone from Tupac to Biggie, Ice Cube to Lauryn Hill, Barack Obama to Nelson Mandela. Drawing upon his own lyrics for inspiration, he invites the reader to go behind the spotlight to see him as he really is—not just as Common but as Lonnie Rashid Lynn.

Each chapter begins with a letter from Common addressed to an important person in his life—from his daughter to his close friend and collaborator Kanye West, from his former love Erykah Badu to you, the reader. Through it all, Common emerges as a man in full. Rapper. Actor. Activist. But also father, son, and friend. Common’s story offers a living example of how, no matter what you’ve gone through, one day it’ll all make sense.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Common and Adam Bradley

Rashid Lynn, aka, Common, a film and television actor and award-winning music artist, lives in Los Angeles. An independent publisher/author of books for children, including The Mirror and Me and I Like You but I Love Me, this is his first book for adults. Adam Bradley is the co-editor of The Anthology of Rap and the author of Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop, among other titles.

Editorial Reviews

Common distinguishes himself here as a true artist and a writer of deep talent. This book is the story of an artist in constant evolution, one who embodies the strength of the brilliant woman that raised him, the love of the Southside Chicago land that spawned him, and the raw spirit of the pro basketball player who fathered him. I’ve always heard that the people of Southside Chicago were special. I’m glad their native son Common shows us why. –James McBride Author of The Color of Water

“Common is a 360-degree human being, and I don’t say that about many people. He never needed to “pimp the hood” to achieve his deserved success. He is an eloquent and honorable role model and his memoir is a perfect example of his depth as a human being. In addition, reading about his childhood and upbringing in Chicago is really a trip – because we went through so many of the same experiences albeit decades apart. Chicago is still the roughest and primary “Institution of Hard Knocks,” and if you can make it there, you can truly make it anywhere!” –Quincy Jones

“Raw in its honesty, profound in its insights, One Day It’ll All Make Sense establishes Common as a voice that is as compelling on the page as it is on a record. This is not simply the story of an individual artist but a crucial page the history of hip hop itself.” –Jelani Cobb, author of The Substance of Hope

‘One Day It’ll All Make Sense’ by Common with Adam Bradley

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – December 19, 2011 (Excerpt)

When I first heard that former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin had said it was “too easy” to criticize the White House for inviting rapper Common to an event, I thought, “Of all the rappers proudly repping the most negative aspects of their backgrounds, she picked Common? Is there another rapper named Common I don’t know about? And when did she start listening to hip hop anyway?”

Although I don’t get the impression that she’s heard many of his lyrics outside of the song* she believes would “glorify cop killing during Police Memorial Week,” while reading this book my first thought was, “Man, I hope she never gets a copy.”

The problem with memoirs is when a reader, or a fan, has built up in his or her mind how an artist should be and it turns out they aren’t like that, it can be sobering.

Some of the major disappointments in Common’s book were his borderline bragging about being in a gang, leaving a boy threatening answering machine messages because he was wealthy and smart, prowling for fights with drunken friends, recalling how his clique beat up some guy in an elevator for throwing up a pitchfork (gang symbol) and being held back by his friends so he wouldn’t attack someone for verbally making snide comments. [Read the full article...]

Advertisement

THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

A beautifully illustrated, totally engrossing celebration of the piano, and the composers and performers who have made it their own.

With honed sensitivity and unquestioned expertise, Stuart Isacoff—pianist, critic, teacher, and author of Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization—unfolds the ongoing history and evolution of the piano and all its myriad wonders: how its very sound provides the basis for emotional expression and individual style, and why it has so powerfully entertained generation upon generation of listeners. He illuminates the groundbreaking music of Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Schumann, and Debussy. He analyzes the breathtaking techniques of Glenn Gould, Oscar Peterson, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Arthur Rubinstein, and Van Cliburn, and he gives musicians including Alfred Brendel, Murray Perahia, Menahem Pressler, and Vladimir Horowitz the opportunity to discuss their approaches. Isacoff delineates how classical music and jazz influenced each other as the uniquely American art form progressed from ragtime, novelty, stride, boogie, bebop, and beyond, through Scott Joplin, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Cecil Taylor, and Bill Charlap.
 
A Natural History of the Piano distills a lifetime of research and passion into one brilliant narrative. We witness Mozart unveiling his monumental concertos in Vienna’s coffeehouses, using a special piano with one keyboard for the hands and another for the feet; European virtuoso Henri Herz entertaining rowdy miners during the California gold rush; Beethoven at his piano, conjuring healing angels to console a grieving mother who had lost her child; Liszt fainting in the arms of a page turner to spark an entire hall into hysterics. Here is the instrument in all its complexity and beauty. We learn of the incredible craftsmanship of a modern Steinway, the peculiarity of specialty pianos built for the Victorian household, the continuing innovation in keyboards including electronic ones. And most of all, we hear the music of the masters, from centuries ago and in our own age, brilliantly evoked and as marvelous as its most recent performance.

With this wide-ranging volume, Isacoff gives us a must-have for music lovers, pianists, and the armchair musician.

About Stuart Isacoff

Stuart Isacoff, a pianist and writer, was the founder of Piano Today magazine, which he edited for nearly three decades. A winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music, he is a regular contributor on the arts to The Wall Street Journal and has written for The New York Times, Chamber Music, Symphony, Musical America, Stagebill, and The New Grove Dictionary of American Music. Mr. Isacoff is also the author of Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization. He is on the faculty of the SUNY Purchase College Conservatory of Music. He lives in Closter, New Jersey.

Editorial Reviews

“An encyclopedic and argumentative overview of all things piano . . . [Isacoff’s stylistic] groups—combustibles, alchemists, rhythmizers, and melodists—shape a piano gestalt through which readers will be impressed . . . by the depth and diversity of Isacoff’s research and references.” - Publishers Weekly

“Dizzy Gillespie used to tell his musicians, whatever their instruments, to come to the piano with him as he said, ‘The music is all there.’ In Stuart Isacoff’s A Natural History of the Piano, never before have I learned and enjoyed so much about the instrument and its most distinctive practitioners—transcending so many categories of music. Whether the subject is jazz or classical music, the writing is unfailingly engaging and revealing.” - Nat Hentoff

“Every page of this book is filled with the poetry of Isacoff’s writing as he outlines the fascinating development of the piano and its effect on music tradition throughout the centuries. The research is of great depth: how Isacoff weaves what he has discovered into a gripping and entertaining narrative is sheer magic. Essential reading for anyone who embraces not only the piano, but music, history, and culture. Bravo, Maestro Isacoff!”  - Frank Brady, author of Endgame

“A Natural History of the Piano : The Instrument, the Music, the Musicians — from Mozart to Modern Jazz and Everything in Between,” by Stuart Isacoff

The Washington Post Book Review – December 23, 2011 (Excerpt)

“I love a piano!” was the hit song of Irving Berlin’s 1915 Broadway show, “Stop! Look! Listen!” It’s with a similar exclamatory devotion that pianist and writer Stuart Isacoff has given us “A Natural History of the Piano.” As his subtitle promises, Isacoff explores the evolution of what he calls the “most important instrument ever created.”

Rather than following a linear timeline, this natural history winds in and out of centuries and genres, introducing a stream of personalities, facts and ideas. Appearing like pop-up delights within the text are boxes containing related information and short essays written by world-famous pianists from Alfred Brendel to Billy Taylor. The cumulative result is like listening to a fascinating raconteur who informs and entertains and really knows his stuff.

Descended from the psaltery, a plucked instrument using feather quills and originally from the Far and Middle East, the piano is today made of “wood and cast iron, hammers and pivots, weighing altogether nearly a thousand pounds — and capable of sustaining twenty-two tons of tension on its strings (the equivalent of about twenty medium-sized cars.)” Along the path of piano development, we are introduced to wondrous and wacky keyboard creations, such as the “giraffe” piano with “an outlandish case that rises high above the keyboard” to a “convertible bedroom piano complete with foldout mattress and drawers.” [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Beethoven permeates American culture. His image appears on countless busts and coffee mugs; his music is heard in movie scores, TV soundtracks, commercials, and pop songs; he is Schroeder’s god in Peanuts and Chuck Berry’s freaked-out parent in “Roll over Beethoven.” In this book, Michael Broyles seeks to understand the composer as he exists in the American imagination and explores how Beethoven became a cultural icon. Broyles examines Beethoven’s appearance in a variety of contexts: American commercialism, the Afrocentrist and black power movements, and the modernist critique of Romanticism. He considers portrayals of Beethoven in American film and theater and the uses of his music in film scores, as well as references to Beethoven and his music in disco, country, rock, and rap. In the end, he shows that to examine Beethoven on American soil is to examine America itself.

About Michael Broyles

Michael Broyles is Professor of Music at Florida State University and former Distinguished Professor of Music and Professor of American History at Pennsylvania State University. His most recent book, Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices (IUP, 2007), written with Denise Von Glahn, won the Irving Lowens Prize in 2007.

Editorial Reviews

“This book fills a great gap in our understanding both of Beethoven and of American culture. The panorama of this narrative encompasses antebellum rice plantations in South Carolina and the film studios of Hollywood, music critic John Dwight and rock star Chuck Berry, Theosophy and Black Power, Beethoven’s sketches, and YouTube videos.” — Christopher Reynolds, University of California, Davis

“[Broyles] serves as an intellectual, hyper-informed but genial tour guide to a potentially sprawling subject. Though the book is dense in research, it is never pompous; it could serve as a model for how serious musicological study can be generously shared with interested parties who don’t happen to be in the same profession.” — Santa Fe New Mexican

Don’t Scowl, Beethoven, You’re Loved

The New York Times Book Review – December 18, 2011 (Excerpt)

If we are to believe the Beethoven mythology, which is based mostly on his letters and reports from his inner circle, Beethoven had an unshakeable sense of his own importance. Unlike Mozart and Haydn he refused to defer to nobility, asserting that a composer is of greater value, in the cosmic scheme of things, than a prince. And though he had patrons among the aristocracy, he revered Napoleon, their nemesis, and dedicated his Third Symphony, the “Eroica” (“Heroic”) to him, only to remove the dedication when Napoleon crowned himself emperor.

Beethoven was probably much as history painted him: the deaf painter in sound, ingenious, embattled and defiant, but also a disheveled, scowling force of nature whose unpleasantness and irritability people suffered for the sake of his brilliance. In his music he tweaked conventions and was undaunted when works like the “Eroica” were criticized for their wildness, harmonic adventurousness and, for the time, outrageous length. Such criticisms aside, an enormous constituency regarded him reverently, and unlike Mahler, who believed that his time would come long after his death, Beethoven knew that he had seized his day.

But even Beethoven probably would have been surprised at the place his name and image have found at the heart of American culture, including popular culture. Yes, it’s true that millions of Americans get through their days, weeks and months without hearing a note of Beethoven or giving him a thought. But as Michael Broyles points out in his fascinating but uneven “Beethoven in America,” just about everyone knows Beethoven’s name, if not necessarily his music, and for millions — particularly those with little interest in the symphonic world — he is synonymous with the classics. [Read the full article...]

“Beethoven in America” by Michael Broyles

The Washington Post Book Review – December 23, 2011 (Excerpt)

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be the ghost of a dead classical musician, looking on while the rock and rollers get all the credit for bringing music to bear on pop culture. You might start cursing your luck that you didn’t have a guitar and amp available in your century of yore. Or, if you’re in a somewhat more hopeful mood, you might turn your attention to Beethoven, as Florida State professor Michael Broyles has in “Beethoven in America,” which makes the case that not only was Beethoven the all-around musical stud of musical studs, he might be the greatest of all musical ingratiators, turning up in our American corner of the universe, again and again, and more than most of us realize.

Even though most music fans are not classical music fans, the term “classical composer” tends to suggest the same things to a whole litany of people who don’t know the difference between a bass guitar and a bagatelle. We’re apt to conjure up someone possessed of a fiery and intractable temperament, a severe and draconian guy who’s probably poor and who works feverishly into the night, inspiration coursing through him as he scribbles out his runic notations before banging away at his keyboard. In other words, you probably arrive at an image of Beethoven as he has come down to us through the years in myriad tales, accounts, films, cartoons, lampoons, drawings and history books. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Miles Davis, supremely cool behind his shades. Billie Holiday, eyes closed and head tilted back in full cry. John Coltrane, one hand behind his neck and a finger held pensively to his lips. These iconic images have captivated jazz fans nearly as much as the music has. Jazz photographs are visual landmarks in American history, acting as both a reflection and a vital part of African American culture in a time of immense upheaval, conflict, and celebration. Charting the development of jazz photography from the swing era of the 1930s to the rise of black nationalism in the ’60s, Blue Notes in Black and White is the first of its kind: a fascinating account of the partnership between two of the twentieth century’s most innovative art forms.

Benjamin Cawthra introduces us to the great jazz photographers—including Gjon Mili, William Gottlieb, Herman Leonard, Francis Wolff, Roy DeCarava, and William Claxton—and their struggles, hustles, styles, and creative visions. We also meet their legendary subjects, such as Duke Ellington, sweating through a late-night jam session for the troops during World War II, and Dizzy Gillespie, stylish in beret, glasses, and goatee. Cawthra shows us the connections between the photographers, art directors, editors, and record producers who crafted a look for jazz that would sell magazines and albums. And on the other side of the lens, he explores how the musicians shaped their public images to further their own financial and political goals.

This mixture of art, commerce, and racial politics resulted in a rich visual legacy that is vividly on display in Blue Notes in Black and White. Beyond illuminating the aesthetic power of these images, Cawthra ultimately shows how jazz and its imagery served a crucial function in the struggle for civil rights, making African Americans proudly, powerfully visible.

About Benjamin Cawthra

Benjamin Cawthra is associate professor of history and associate director of the Center for Oral and Public History at California State University, Fullerton.

Editorial Reviews

“To Cawthra, jazz photography genuinely captures a moment in time–these images are ‘benchmarks’ in the metamorphosis of music. He probes the portfolios of some of jazz photography’s well-known operatives–Gjon Mili, Herman Leonard, and William Claxton–whose individual styles mirror a musical genre that is just as dynamic.” -Down Beat

“Benjamin Cawthra, writing with grace and a formidable command of jazz history and American culture, makes us see the sounds, the social relations, and the myths of jazz as he ably uncovers the personal and institutional networks of musicians, writers, magazines, and record companies in which jazz photography developed. Even asBlue Notes in Black and White casts a sharp eye on photographic aesthetics—its pages brim with bracing insights into Gjon Mili’s informal but magisterial style, Francis Wolff’s use of chiaroscuro, and Herman Leonard’s concept of the sculpted face—it also works as a groundbreaking history of jazz criticism. At its best, this excellent book serves as a model for a multisensory music criticism: while reading it, I often felt I was hearing the music more deeply.”—John Gennari, author of Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics

“This is a highly engaging and deeply engaged meditation on the development of the modern jazz photography tradition. Cawthra’s probing analysis of how ‘the photographic culture of jazz’ helped make jazz visible perceptively illuminates and contributes significantly to the fascinating, revealing, and ongoing debate surrounding not just the jazz image, notably the African American jazz image, but also jazz history, the meanings of jazz, and indeed the role of jazz in the making of modern American culture.”—Waldo E. Martin, Jr., author of No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics in Postwar America

They Put the Face on an American Sound

The New York Times Book Review – December 15, 2011 (Excerpt)

Benjamin Cawthra’s “Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz” is not entirely, or specifically, about its subtitle. That would be a book with a lot more images, or at least with more concentrated information on the history of all kinds of jazz photography over the last century, in newspapers and magazines and in the promotional campaigns of record companies.

Instead, this occasionally powerful but uneven book is a selective and essayistic history on how the still-image camera conferred cultural legitimacy to jazz as black music, for the most part between the late 1930s and the mid-1960s. It analyzes the early photo spreads on jazz in Life magazine, as well as the writing and the layouts; the development of bebop, with its own visual code, as rendered by the jazz press; and the diverging looks of late-1950s jazz as suggested by album covers released by independent labels in New York and Los Angeles. (Shadows and cigarette smoke versus sunlight and oceanfront.) It deals at length with Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins, and how pictures of them on and off stage helped build or maintain their personas.

The book focuses on art photographers, or photojournalists with a serious interest in photography as art, and it shows you their relationships and lines of influence. (Dennis Stock, who took the book’s cover photo of Miles Davis in 1957, worked as an assistant to Gjon Mili, the innovative Albanian-American photojournalist; Herman Leonardworked for Yousuf Karsh, the Armenian-Canadian portraitist; William Claxton studied the images of Leonard; Roy DeCarava benefited from the patronage of Edward Steichen.) It considers aesthetic, ethical and political questions engaged by photographers including William Gottlieb, Mili and DeCarava.   It is to a lesser extent about the individual photographers’ technique and visual style: Leonard’s, glamorous and backlighted; Mili’s, stark and stroboscopic; DeCarava’s, shadowy and suggestive. [Read the full article...]

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CRIMSON DAWN
Book One of the Darklife Saga by Ronnie Massey

Two Women Hunting A Rogue Vampire

Vampire Valeria Trumaine must confront old demons and face new possibilities as she struggles to bring a rogue vampire to justice. Her best friend and powerful Sidhe princess, Irulan, joins the hunt. Valeria will find that Irulan’s motives for keeping her safe are not what she thinks. And soon she is faced with an undeniable attraction that makes her question everything she knew about herself. [Read More...]

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Punk rock and hip-hop. Disco and salsa. The loft jazz scene and the downtown composers known as Minimalists. In the mid-1970s, New York City was a laboratory where all the major styles of modern music were reinvented—all at once, from one block to the next, by musicians who knew, admired, and borrowed from one another. Crime was everywhere, the government was broke, and the city’s infrastructure was collapsing. But rent was cheap, and the possibilities for musical exploration were limitless.

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is the first book to tell the full story of the era’s music scenes and the phenomenal and surprising ways they intersected. From New Year’s Day 1973 to New Year’s Eve 1977, the book moves panoramically from post-Dylan Greenwich Village, to the arson-scarred South Bronx barrios where salsa and hip-hop were created, to the Lower Manhattan lofts where jazz and classical music were reimagined, to ramshackle clubs like CBGBs and The Gallery, where rock and dance music were hot-wired for a new generation. As they remade the music, the musicians at the center of the book invented themselves: Willie Colón and the Fania All-Stars renting Yankee Stadium to take salsa to the masses, New Jersey locals Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith claiming the jungleland of Manhattan as their own, Grandmaster Flash transforming the turntable into a musical instrument, David Byrne and Talking Heads proving that rock music “ain’t no foolin’ around.” Will Hermes was there—venturing from his native Queens to the small dark rooms where the revolution was taking place—and in Love Goes to Buildings on Fire he captures the creativity, drive, and full-out lust for life of the great New York musicians of those years, who knew that the music they were making would change the world.

About Will Hermes

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CRIMSON DAWN
Book One of the Darklife Saga by Ronnie Massey

Two Women Hunting A Rogue Vampire

Vampire Valeria Trumaine must confront old demons and face new possibilities as she struggles to bring a rogue vampire to justice. Her best friend and powerful Sidhe princess, Irulan, joins the hunt. Valeria will find that Irulan’s motives for keeping her safe are not what she thinks. And soon she is faced with an undeniable attraction that makes her question everything she knew about herself. [Read More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

After his acclaimed and best-selling Finishing the Hat (named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2010), Stephen Sondheim returns with the second volume of his collected lyrics, Look, I Made a Hat, giving us another remarkable glimpse into the brilliant mind of this living legend, and his life’s work.

Picking up where he left off in Finishing the Hat, Sondheim gives us all the lyrics, along with excluded songs and early drafts, of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Assassins and Passion.Here, too, is an in-depth look at the evolution of Wise Guys, which subsequently was transformed into Bounce and eventually became Road Show. Sondheim takes us through his contributions to both television and film, some of which may surprise you, and covers plenty of never-before-seen material from unproduced projects as well. There are abundant anecdotes about his many collaborations, and readers are treated to rare personal material in this volume, as Sondheim includes songs culled from commissions, parodies and personal special occasions over the years—such as a hilarious song for Leonard Bernstein’s seventieth birthday. As he did in the previous volume, Sondheim richly annotates his lyrics with invaluable advice on songwriting, discussions of theater history and the state of the industry today, and exacting dissections of his work, both the successes and the failures.

Filled with even more behind-the-scenes photographs and illustrations from Sondheim’s original manuscripts, Look, I Made a Hat is fascinating, devourable and essential reading for any fan of the theater or this great man’s work.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Stephen Sondheim

Stephen Sondheim has written award-winning music and lyrics for theater, film and television. He is also the coauthor of the film The Last of Sheila and the play Getting Away with Murder. Sondheim is on the council of the Dramatists Guild of America, having served as its president from 1973 to 1981. He lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

“Sondheim is a national treasure, a giant in the world of musical theater who changed the structure and sound of the form in 20th-century masterpieces. Speaking of heaven, though, here’s Look, I Made a Hat, the second part of Sondheim’s two-volume collection of lyrics, this one spanning 1981-2011, with additional bits and pieces. Talmudically thorough and devilishly diverting with what the author refers to as ‘attendant comments, amplifications, dogmas, harangues, digressions, anecdotes, and miscellany,’ the book is divine. It’s also even more magnanimously authoritative than the first book. The handsomely designed book, like the first volume, contains illuminating reproductions of pages from the author’s beloved legal pads on which he works out rhyme schemes, as well as annotated scripts and pages of musical notations. And the second volume is brimming — a word Sondheim would probably dismiss as ‘infelicitous’ — with precise, vigorous, instructive, sharp-tongued, and often very funny comments. Look, I Made a Hat, together with Finishing the Hat, makes an enormously satisfying journal by one of the great theatrical minds of our time, a guide and touchstone for who knows how many future great theatrical minds. A” —Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

“While the book technically covers Mr. Sondheim’s output from 1981 to the present, aficionados will delight in all the bits and bobs from early in his career that Mr. Sondheim didn’t make room for in the first volume . . . The extensive miscellany also includes a drawerful of lyrics Mr. Sondheim wrote as birthday gifts for friends like Harold Prince, Mary Rodgers and Leonard Bernstein. One of the choicest pleasures of the first volume was in Mr. Sondheim’s sharp-minded analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of musical theater lyricists from the past. He’s covered most of that territory already, so the new book features essays on ‘Awards and Their Uselessness’ and ‘Critics and Their Uses’ — savory reading.” —Charles Isherwood, New York Times

Eavesdropping on Sondheim

The New York Times Book Review – December 8, 2011 (Excerpt)

“But then I met James Lapine.” Thus ends, on a cliffhanger worthy of an artist who cherishes a passion for mystery tales, the first volume of Stephen Sondheim’s collected lyrics, published last fall and already well thumbed and argued over by this composer-lyricist’s legion of passionate admirers, second only to Wagnerians in their obsessive dedication.

The second volume, “Look, I Made a Hat,” deposits us comfortably at the bottom of that cliff, with intriguing new vistas ahead for Mr. Sondheim, who describes his collaborations with Mr. Lapine as a vital artistic renewal after the troubled gestation and brief Broadway run of “Merrily We Roll Along.” Lyrics from the three musicals Mr. Sondheim wrote with Mr. Lapine — the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Sunday in the Park With George,” “Into the Woods” and “Passion” — compose the formidable (and weightier) first half of the new book, along with the equally significant “Assassins,” written with John Weidman.

Although he confesses to a powerful affection for writing pastiche — songs that intentionally evoke previous styles of music — Mr. Sondheim’s later works more potently illustrate the continual reach of his musical and lyrical imagination. Each of the four is as unalike the others as can be imagined, and each required Mr. Sondheim to plunge in a risky new direction, even when, as in “Assassins,” he was intentionally employing familiar song forms to radically unfamiliar ends.

Mr. Sondheim, who comes across in both books as remarkably clear-eyed in assessing himself, makes a telling observation about the evolution of his writing under the influence of Mr. Lapine. “When I look back as objectively as I can at the shows I wrote before James and contrast them with ‘Sunday in the Park With George’ and the others I wrote with him,” he says, “it seems clear to me that a quality of detachment suffuses the first set, whereas a current of vulnerability, of longing, informs the second.” [Read the full article...]

Sondheim on Sondheim

The New York Times Book Review – December 16, 2011 (Excerpt)

Stephen Sondheim claims to dislike most opera, and I guess I believe it. He also says he avoids serious fiction, and I suppose I believe this, too, even if his new book, “Look, I Made a Hat,” which collects his lyrics for the musical theater written from 1981 to 2011, does conclude with a quotation from James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

He makes it difficult to take his denials altogether seriously. Ever since he wrote the lyrics for “West Side Story” (in the mid-’50s, when he was only in his mid-20s), Sondheim has been pushing the essentially bright and slap-happy American musical toward tragic opera’s darker and more unrelieved terrain. And he seems to possess a born novelist’s passion for delineating dense but believable motivation. “What lasts in the theater is character,” he once observed — a conviction underpinning many of the outflung reflections in “Look, I Made a Hat.”

His new book is a follow-up to last year’s “Finishing the Hat,” which assembled lyrics from 1954 to 1981. Both books carry long subtitles. “Finishing the Hat” promised “Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes,” while “Look, I Made a Hat” offers “Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany.” These are overlapping lists with instructive differences. The “grudges” of “Finishing the Hat” often involved score-settling, mostly with critics but also with a few impossible colleagues. By contrast, “Look, I Made a Hat” feels less bristly than resignedly rueful (“The desire for failure emanating from people who presumably love musicals is persistently baffling to me”). Sondheim once briefly served as a visiting theater professor at Oxford, and “Look, I Made a Hat” exhibits a donnish ease while blending amusement with edification. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.