Music

"Irresistible....A captivating picture that hasn't beenseen before....THE BEATLES amplifies and corrects some of what is knownabout the band's formative years.... It powerfully evokes both theexcitement and the price of such a sudden rise." --NEW YORK TIMES At last in paperback: the biography the Beatles deserve. It's all here, rawand right--the highs and the lows, the love and the rivalry, the awe andthe jealousy, the drugs, the tears, the thrill, the magic never to berepeated--in a vast, exuberantly acclaimed book that's as brilliant andjoyous and revelatory as a Beatles record itself. more...

Price: $12.99

The Beatles are the most successful entity in the history of the entertainment business ever! Fact! And it all didn’t happen by accident. Four working-class lads met up in and around Liverpool towards the end of the 1950s. They spent several years playing around Liverpool and in Hamburg fine tuning their band, performance and song writing before meeting up with Liverpool entrepreneur Brian Epstein and releasing their first album, Please Please Me, forty years ago today (publication day 23 March 2003). During the following ten years they broke every performance and sales record in the book, most notably in May 1964 each and every one of the top five singles in the American Billboard chart was theirs. On top of which they recorded, arguably, three of the best contemporary albums ever released. The Beatles were the soundtrack to the sixties. This Pocket Essential discusses how they met and, using the songs and records as signposts, takes you on a journey through their colourful, historic and celebrated career. more...

Price: $9.99

When bebop was new, writes Thomas Owens, "many jazz musicians and most of the jazz audience heard it as radical, chaotic, bewildering music." For a nation swinging to the smoothly orchestrated sounds of the big bands, this revolutionary movement of the 1940s must have seemed destined for a short life on the musical fringe. But today, Owens writes, bebop is nothing less than "the lingua franca of jazz, serving as the principal musical language of thousands of jazz musicians." In Bebop, Owens conducts us on an insightful, loving tour through the music, players, and recordings that changed American culture. Combining vivid portraits of bebop's gigantic personalities with deft musical analysis, he ranges from the early classics of modern jazz (starting with the 1943 Onyx Club performances of Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Oscar Pettiford, Don Byas, and George Wallington) through the central role of Charlie Parker, to an instrument-by-instrument look at the key players and their innovations. Illustrating his discussion with numerous musical excerpts, Owens skillfully demonstrates why bebop was so revolutionary, with fascinating glimpses of the tempestuous jazz world: Thelonious Monk, for example, did "everything 'wrong' in the sense of traditional piano technique....Because his right elbow fanned outward away from his body, he often hit the keys at an angle rather than in parallel. Sometimes he hit a single key with more than one finger, and divided single-line melodies between two hands." In addition to his discussions of individual instruments and players, Owens examines ensembles, with their sometimes volatile collaborations: in the Jazz Messengers, Benny Golson told of how his own mellow saxophone playing would get lost under Art Blakey's furious drumming: "He would do one of those famous four-bar drum rolls going into the next chorus, and I would completely disappear. He would holler over at me, 'Get up out of that hole!'" In this marvelous account, Owens comes right t more...

Price: $19.95

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a genius so universal that his popularity, extraordinary even during his lifetime, has never ceased to grow. It now encircles the globe: Beethoven's most famous works are as beloved in Beijing as they are in Boston. Edmund Morris, the author of three bestselling presidential biographies and a lifelong devotee of Beethoven, brings the great composer to life as a man of astonishing complexity and overpowering intelligence. A gigantic, compulsively creative personality unable to tolerate constraints, he was not so much a social rebel as an astute manipulator of the most powerful and privileged aristocrats in Germany and Austria, at a time when their world was threatened by the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. But Beethoven's achievement rests in his immortal music. Struggling against progressive, incurable deafness (which he desperately tried to keep secret), he nonetheless produced towering masterpieces, such as his iconic Fifth and Ninth symphonies. With sensitivity and insight, Edmund Morris illuminates Beethoven's life, including his interactions with the women he privately lusted for but held at bay, and his work, whose grandeur and beauty were conceived ''on the other side of silence.'' more...

Price: $17.95

A comprehensive guide to Beethoven's FIDELIO, featuring Principal Characters in the opera, Brief Story Synopsis, Story Narrative with Music Highlight Examples, and an insightful and in depth Commentary and Analysis by Burton D. Fisher, noted opera author and lecturer. more...

Price: $9.75