A book-and-CD set introducing jazz to the uninitiated. Kernfeld (editor, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, not reviewed) takes an analytical, listening-oriented approach to the music, focusing on seven areas: rhythm, form, arrangement, composition, improvisation, sound, and style. He draws from 21 well-known recorded selections, using them as springboards for his often insightful analyses. Key artists such as Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Sun Ra, and Ornette Coleman are used to demonstrate the variety of individual expression in jazz, as well as the overall continuity that links their diverse styles. This book will appeal most strongly to students and teachers of jazz, because it offers musical analysis with enough of an enthusiast's edge to give a balance to what would otherwise be a purely scholarly discussion. In fact, it is in the asides that Kernfeld's true personality shines (for instance, in his description of Coleman's ``Honeymooners'' as ``delightfully twisted...funky dance music'' or noting how the out-of-tune tonality of New Orleans revivalist Kid Thomas Valentine's band ``contributes to the essential sludge in the sound''). Kernfeld also makes some telling observations, showing, for example, that the modal jazz style of the '50s is based more on slow-moving chord harmonies than on medieval modes. The plethora of notated examples makes for some heavy sledding, and there are a few mysterious choices made in the accompanying CD (not included for review, but according to a list of its contents, for example, Kernfeld will compare two takes of a particular recording in the text, but only one of the two will be offered on the CD- -often the better-known and more easily accessible version—which is certain to frustrate the reader). Deserves to find a home in academic halls, although less essential for the home bookshelf.
Pub Date: May 17, 1995
ISBN: 0-300-05902-7
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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