Popular music
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Jazz Me Blues
Jazz trombonist Chris Barber formed his first band in the late 1940s, but it is the band that he has led from 1954, after parting company with trumpeter Ken Colyer, that has established all kinds of records for success and longevity. The 54 year partnership with trumpeter Pat Halcox is the longest c...
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Heavy Metal
Titus Hjelm, Keith Kahn-Harris, Mark LeVine
Heavy metal is now over 40 years old. It emerged at the tail end of the 1960s in the work of bands including Iron Butterfly, Vanilla Fudge, Jimi Hendrix, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and - most importantly - Black Sabbath. In the 1970s and early 1980s, heavy metal crystallised as a genre as bands such...
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Soul Unsung
Soul music has specific sounds. Soul as it appears in the term 'Soul jazz' has a vastly different sound to soul as it appears in the term 'Nu Classic Soul' yet there are links between the two. The socio-cultural connotations of the two 'souls' are also vastly different as one would expect given the...
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Mr. P.C.
Winner of the 2013 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research in Jazz During his 13 year career between 1955 and 1968, Paul Chambers was one of the leading double bass players in jazz, performing with a wide variety of artists and a range of...
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The Music of Fantasy Cinema
Fantasy has had a modern resurgence in cinema due largely to the success of superhero narratives and the two major fantasy series, the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Often regarded as mere escapism, works of both literature and cinema wishing to be taken seriously by the public, by critics and...
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The Lost Women of Rock Music
In the late 1970s and early 1980s a new phenomenon emerged in UK popular music - female guitarists, bass-players, keyboard-players and drummers began playing in bands. Before this time, women's presence in rock bands, with a few notable exceptions, had always been as vocalists. This sudden influx of...
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Brian Wilson
Finalist, ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Awards 2012, Performing Arts and Music (Adult Non-Fiction) Brian Wilson is a musical genius. Ever since British press agent Derek Taylor launched a publicity campaign with that theme to promote the landmark LP Pet Sounds in 1966, some variation of that cla...
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James Brown
For ten years between 1965 and 1975, James Brown was the most popular and cutting-edge of any black artist. As one journalist put it, "before Brown, there was music with a beat. After Brown music had found a groove." The drawing out of this "groove," leveraged on "the one," - or the first and third...
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Send in the Clones
Although musical tributes play a significant role within contemporary culture and despite their relative longevity as a form of entertainment, little serious research has been published on the subject. This book makes an important contribution to the understanding of the phenomenon of the tribute ba...
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Dub In Babylon
Dub reggae and the techniques associated with it have, since the late-1980s, been used widely by producers of dance and ambient music. However, the term was originally applied to a remixing technique pioneered in Jamaica as far back as 1967. Recording engineers produced reggae tracks on which the ef...