What is the (last) book(s) about music that really left an impression on you and excited you ?

I really enjoyed "I Am Ozzy"

 

Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff
Emerick

Beatles Gear by Andy Babiuk

 

The most recent one I really enjoyed were Bob Mould's autobiography called See a Little Light and a book about Kraftwerk called Publikation.

 

"Few people can write as well about anything as Balliett writes about jazz."

Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2001

Also: The Sound of Our Town: A History Of Boston Rock & Roll.

I'm not in it (as if...) but many friends are.

 

As Serious As Your Life

The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now

A Power Stronger Than Itself

But I'd also suggest, generally,
Thinking in Jazz

And a lovely read, that's kind of an impressionistic roman a clef
But Beautiful, A Book About Jazz

 

More BS has been written about Charlie Parker than any other musician, I think. Here's the story from someone who probably knew him better than he knew himself---without covering all the rumors and urban myths.

 

I would quote passages at length, but you don't have to take my word for it. Search his name and you'll find out that he was not a great jazz critic, he was a great writer, period. If you are really into free jazz, you will probably not like his tastes at all. But to read his description of a Ben Webster solo is to hear the music in your head:

"He would start a medium-slow blues solo very softly with a weaving five-note phrase, pause, play a high, barely audible blue note, and duck back to his opening phrase, still as soft as first sunlight. He would harden his tone slightly at the start of his next chorus, issue an annunciatory phrase, repeat it, insert a defiant tremolo. . . . His tone would grow hard, he would growl and crowd his notes, he would shake his phrases as if he had them clamped in his teeth. . . . As the years went by . . . he would close certain phrase endings by allowing his vibrato to melt into pure undulating breath—dramatically offering, before the breath expired, the ghost of his sound."

If you're interested in what contemporary jazz musicians were like between 1968 and 1972, I highly recommend drummer Art Taylor's "Notes and Tones," a bunch of interviews from notable players who were on the scene at that time. If nothing else, it will make you understand that black American jazz musicians all have their own versions of reality and visions of the world. The interviews with Johnny Griffin and Art Blakey I found particularly affecting, each in very different ways.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Grateful-Dead-Gear-Instruments-Recording/dp/0879308931

I have never been into the Dead, but this book was superb, and about a lot more than just the Dead.

Another great book, although not strictly about music making, is this one:

McIntosh History Book

Some really cool stuff on Woodstock, etc, too.

 

I'm in the middle of a good biography titled (if I remember right; I'm too lazy right now to get up and check) Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings, by Peter Pettinger, Yale University Press. I found it recommended in another book about the making of Miles Davis's album Kind of Blue (also good, but I'm still too lazy to get the details).

My favorite book on music though, is Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung, a collection of writing by rock critic Lester Bangs, who I feel was really a Beat and whose writing, to me, is as much rock as his subject matter. Once was a time I used to find and purchase copies in used bookstores and hand them out to deserving people like they were Gideon bibles.

 

Read a bunch in the past year that left a mark, def some of my new favorites:

Thelonious Monk: the life and times... by Robin Kelley

Sky dog - Duane Allman by randy Poe

The same Geoff Emerick book mentioned above, plus Ken Scott’s, abbey road to ziggy stardust. Great books for engineers and some interesting contrasting opinions on all the Beatle personalities. Which reminded me I have to reread George Martin’s All You Need is Ears.

 

SITSOM

 

The last music book that really excited me was The Jazz Piano Book by Mark Levine (Sher Music Co., 1989). After years of searching, it's the first instructional book that lays everything out in a way that I can actually comprehend. And it's spiral-bound – a huge plus.

The last music book that really left an impression on me was Not Dead Yet by Phil Collins (Crown Archetype, 2016). Like many successful people in the music business, his life has been a series of incredibly high peaks and deep, dark abysses, but this memoir presents it all in wonderful candor.

 

Oh forgot another recent one I really liked - Dexter Gordon, Sophisticated Giant, by his wife Maxine.

 

FANTASTIC book. I’ve read it about 6 times.




I quite like this one as well. Interesting look into the behind the scenes part of touring. Particularly interesting as the psycho wife was on board at the time.