Should inspire many new visitors to the Crescent city and hip them to what's been cooking there all these years.
A casual yet palatable guide to the music of New Orleans that serves up its spicy musical and historical matter in high style.
Seeking clues to the city's rich musical heritage, Lichtenstein (Machisma, 1981) and Dankner (Music/Loyola University) find them in New Orleans's extraordinary racial and cultural mix, and in an appreciation for revelry that goes back to Louisiana's first French governor. The authors describe the Sunday celebrations of slaves in Congo Square, and the influence their music had on the musicians of the city's red-light district. We meet mythic figures like Buddy Bolden, Tony Jackson (so eager to play piano that he built his own at age seven), and Jelly Roll Morton. We encounter Louis Armstrong, whose genius made jazz jump, dropping a sheet of lyrics in the middle of a recording session and inventing scat out of sheer inspired desperation. The authors also make clear the city's contribution to rhythm and blues and rock, with the gospel- drenched voicings of Ray Brown and Little Richard, and with Fats Domino and Dave Bartholomew honing the art of the "two minute radio hit.'' Full of stories, anecdotes, and interviews, the text describes the contribution of masters like Dr. John and the Neville Brothers to many classic R&B recordings, and it brings us up to the present with performers like the Marsalis family, the Rebirth Band, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and many underappreciated musicians. And though the authors tiptoe around controversies like the one surrounding Wynton Marsalis's paradox-riven jazz purism, they don't fail to investigate the role of education or of ethnic and social tensions in New Orleans's musical development, and they make clear how the various artists have suffered for the music that has made their city "America's Florence.''
Should inspire many new visitors to the Crescent city and hip them to what's been cooking there all these years.Pub Date: June 7, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03468-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1993
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
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
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