Only about half the populace reads books anymore, according to recent surveys. Which means one of us might be in the wrong place — and I’m pretty sure it isn’t me. Even so, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt — provided you pick up one of the new music tomes hitting shelves next week:
The Musical Identities of Harry Partch: History, Theory, Performance
Edited by Dr. S. Andrew Granade
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Harry Partch (1901-74) stood apart in 20th-century music. A visionary composer, theorist, and builder of over 50 visually and aurally astonishing instruments, he rejected the confines of Western tuning and performance to forge an art that fused sound, movement, and ritual. His music grew from his life, which included hobo journeys, explorations of alternative tunings, and a fierce commitment to individuality. These experiences resulted in a body of work as theatrical as it was sonically adventurous. In recent decades, scholarship has flourished, performances and recordings have become more numerous, yet Partch’s legacy remains a challenge, largely because his identities as composer, instrument builder, philosopher, and provocateur resist easy categorization. This collection gathers leading voices to expand present-day understanding of the diverse elements that defined Partch’s multiple musical identities. Essays trace the entanglement of his instruments with his creative vision, reconsider his sexuality and self-mythologizing, link his microtonal theories to both ancient Greek thought and contemporary composition, and examine the practical and interpretive challenges of performing his music today. Contributors reveal a figure whose work speaks to questions of identity, community, and the very purpose of musical creation. Richly interdisciplinary and vividly written, The Musical Identities of Harry Partch: History, Theory, Performance offers new perspectives for scholars, performers, and listeners alike, and invites all to step into Partch’s singular sound-world and discover its continuing resonance.”
Where The Music Had To Go: How Bob Dylan And The Beatles Changed Each Other ― And The World
By Jim Windolf
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Persuasive, captivating, and bursting with insight, this dual biography by acclaimed New York Times journalist Jim Windolf dives into the surprisingly supportive, occasionally rivalrous, and always fertile relationship between Bob Dylan and The Beatles, uncovering how they inspired and transformed each other as songwriters, recording artists, and cultural icons. From Dylan’s initial dismissal of The Beatles as being for “teenyboppers” to his realization that they were “pointing the direction where music had to go” — and from The Beatles’ obsessive spinning of early Dylan records to their impromptu renditions of 15 Dylan songs during the 1969 Get Back sessions — the book captures the moments that pushed Dylan to “go electric” and inspired The Beatles to deepen their lyrics. Highly entertaining and packed with backstage anecdotes, Where The Music Had To Go is a deep-focus portrait of a heretofore unexamined relationship, one full of camaraderie, competition, and mutual evolution. More than a music biography, this is a front-row seat to the forces that shaped an era — an unmissable experience for music lovers, pop-culture buffs, and anyone curious about the magic that happens when legends collide.”
Mann Made: The Story Of Manfred Mann 1963-1969
By Guy Mowbray
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Mann Made is the definitive story of one of the ’60s most successful groups. The story is told through interviews with all the original and surviving members of Manfred Mann. Back in the ’50s, founder member Manfred Lubowitz had a growing disdain for the long established and strict apartheid culture in his birthplace of South Africa. He moved to England and by the early ’60s met and played with fellow jazz musician Mike Hugg. After various name changes, Manfred Mann was formed in 1963. A string of hits followed. The group even managed to change its frontman, leadsinger Paul Jones and still maintain their success. Other changes followed including the addition of Klaus Voormann and Jack Bruce. Manfred Mann contained a wealth of talent including Manfred, Paul Jones, Mike Hugg, Mike Vickers, Dave Richmond, Tom McGuinness and also Mike d’Abo, who wrote the classic Handbags And Gladrags. The band quit when they were still at the top leaving a string of hits including Do Wah Diddy Diddy, 5-4-3-2-1, Pretty Flamingo and a string of Bob Dylan covers, including Mighty Quinn.”
How Black Music Took Over The World
By Melvin Gibbs
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Why do Bob Marley, John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone move us the way they do? What drives the worried notes of the Delta blues? What makes Beyoncé’s triumph Cowboy Carter inescapably great? As Melvin Gibbs shows in How Black Music Took Over The World, it is the musical inheritance of Africa. Beginning with two rhythmic building blocks he calls the cell and the frame, Gibbs shows how those tools can transport listeners to “a realm where sounds become vehicles for human movement.” Reforged in the African diaspora in the Americas, they are played today on church organs, electric guitars, computers, telephones, or a simple gourd. Kool & The Gang called Black musicians the “scientists of sound” — and Gibbs shows how they discovered the world’s music. Gibbs’s vantage is unique. A world-class musician fluent in many genres, Gibbs is as comfortable in an old-school Times Square record shop as he is breaking down mathematics and music theory with university professors. Imbued with his own journey and a sharp eye for the sins and triumphs of history, How Black Music Took Over The World is an unforgettable revelation of one of humanity’s greatest achievements.”
Blackstar Rising And The Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives Of David Bowie And Prince
Edited by Daphne A. Brooks
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Blackstar Rising And The Purple Reign is the first critical anthology dedicated to exploring the legacies of the pop music icons David Bowie and Prince. Daphne A. Brooks brings together an extraordinary array of writers, artists, and scholars, including Greg Tate, Jack Halberstam, Kara Keeling, Eric Lott and Ann Powers, to offer fresh insight into how Bowie and Prince each fundamentally changed pop culture as musicians who emerged at the intersections of modern movements surrounding race, gender, sexuality, and art. Featured alongside these pieces are interviews with trusted collaborators of Bowie and Prince such as D.A. Pennebaker, Sheila E. and Marie France, giving vital insider context to the impact both artists had on pop culture and the complexities of their repertoires, politics, and private lives. This work is essential reading for any fan of two of the most formidable and eminent figures in pop culture history.”
Jazz, Race, And Writing, 1945-1970
By Willis Salomon
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Jazz, Race, And Writing, 1945-1970 addresses jazz at its modernist apotheosis, from the 1940s to the 1970s, both the music and its cultural resonances. The author begins by examining autobiographical texts by two highly influential musicians: Miles Davis’s Miles: The Autobiography (1990) and Charles Mingus’s Beneath The Underdog (1971). The book then moves to discussions of the music by the late poet and cultural critic Amiri Baraka, the contemporary cultural critic and poet Fred Moten, and the late critic and public intellectual Stanley Crouch. The Davis and Mingus texts, in their highly distinctive autobiographical voices, highlight the volatile creative energy of jazz improvisation during this period and the correspondingly impeding cultural conditions that surrounded these musical advances. In talking about their lives, their music, and the cultural conditions surrounding both, Davis and Mingus, in very different ways, reveal how the very texture of jazz, as well as its efficient mode of production, ensemble improvisation, reflects and refracts these very American social conditions, producing the arresting achievements of mid-century modern jazz despite social odds and financial impediments. Baraka, Moten, and Crouch, also in very different ways, reinforce the character of these musicians’ voices and fill in some of the theoretical and social aspects of the music’s conditions of production, as these writers critically engage some of the intersections of musical, political, and ethical life enacted in the autobiographies, including issues of improvisational practice, race, economic exploitation, gendered performance, and political agency.”
Where Next, Columbus? A Native Punk Mixtape
By Thomas Michael Swensen
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Just as a mixtape brings together disparate songs to give voice to its curator’s musical mindset, in Where Next, Columbus? Thomas Michael Swensen juxtaposes different types of cultural production to explore how Native America and punk coexist, inform each other, and together articulate their own politics. Through an archive of zines, songs, flyers and art installation, Swensen maps hardcore, thrash, metal, and even pop-punk onto the Indigenous Americas. With each chapter a track, the book compiles a setlist drawn from across the Western Hemisphere, from sparsely populated regions of Alaska to the crowded streets of Mexico City, where a punk market stands atop the ruins of Tenochtitlan. Emerging from the mix is the discovery that Native punk articulates sovereignty beyond definitions of state power by exerting independence from corporations and governments. This mixtape reveals how Native punk, pinned at the crossroads of the personal and the collective, articulates self-determination to question both tribal norms and colonial tropes. Stage diving with the Friends of Cesar Romero, The Bastard Fairies, Lozen and Postcommodity, Where Next, Columbus? conducts readers on a journey that engages familiar punk maxims like DIY ethics, disruptive artistry, humor as critique, and the relentless questioning of authority figures — arriving at a kaleidoscopic vision of sovereignty through Native sounds and visual arts. Where next, Columbus? We’re already there. Press play.”
Free Stickers With Every Order: A History Of Hardcore Stickers
By Thomas Rackow
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Free Stickers With Every Order: A History Of Hardcore Stickers is the first book dedicated entirely to the visual and cultural legacy of hardcore punk stickers. Spanning North America from the early 1980s to 2024, the book documents a fleeting and affordable medium that helped define the DIY ethos of the hardcore scene. Stickers were cheap to produce and easy to distribute. Their immediacy made them powerful tools of promotion, protest, identity, and community. Pasted on lampposts, venue walls, record bins, and street signs, they carried hardcore’s values far beyond the shows themselves. Collected over decades by Thomas Rackow, this deluxe hardcover pairs full-color archival material with firsthand interviews from across the scene. The book features visual material and contributions connected to bands including 7 Seconds, Quicksand, Earth Crisis, Have Heart, American Nightmare, Integrity, Agnostic Front and more. The book preserves rare and often long-lost sticker artifacts from a medium never meant to last. Rather than aiming for encyclopedic completeness, it presents a carefully edited archive shaped by what has survived. The result is a focused and honest time capsule of hardcore’s visual language, values, and community, told by the people who lived it.”
Bulletproof: The Little Guide To BTS
By OH
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Few artists have seen global success close to that of K-pop boy band BTS. Standing for Bangtan Sonyeondan, or Bulletproof Boy Scouts, the band have rocketed into superstardom as the world has fallen in love with these seven charismatic members and their extensive discography. The “BTS effect” can hardly be understated — and its roots are many. Their catchy songs with meaningful messages and high-energy choreography are only a small part of the picture. The band’s loyal army of fans worship them for their charming and quirky personalities, genuine authenticity, and perhaps most importantly, their chemistry and relationship with each other. Packed with their best quotes, most surprising facts and hilarious moments, get to know the boys behind the band in this little book. Their fans say you find BTS when you need them most — and now is your chance to get to know Jin, SUGA, j-Hope, RM, Jimin, V and Jungkook.”
Orbit: Beastie Boys
By Michael Frizell & Martin Gimenez
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Orbit: Beastie Boys charts the meteoric rise, fall, and lasting legacy of hip-hop’s most unlikely icons. From the punk clubs of N.Y.C. to global superstardom, this comic biography dives deep into the lives of Adam “MCA” Yauch, Michael “Mike D” Diamond and Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz — told through their voices and those who shaped them. With dynamic art and raw storytelling, witness their transformation from hardcore kids to genre-busting pioneers. Whether you’re a lifelong fan or new to the beat, this is the definitive tribute to the band that fought for their right-and built a legacy that still rocks today.”
Orbit: Phish
By Todd Matthy & Igor Cicarini
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Orbit: Phish is a captivating biography comic that chronicles the iconic journey of the band Phish. Through vibrant artwork and insightful storytelling, the comic explores the band’s formation, rise to fame, and their unique blend of musical genres that captivated a devoted fanbase. It delves into the personalities of band members, their creative evolution, and the cultural impact of their live performances. With humor, heart, and a deep appreciation for their music, Orbit: Phish offers both fans and newcomers an engaging look into the band’s dynamic history and their influence on modern rock and jam bands.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source tinnitist.com ’
