A warm, inspiring book by a man who seems to have little ego despite a career spent near the peak of his art. Recommended...
One of the most innovative and admired jazz musicians of his generation reminisces about his career.
Born in 1940, Hancock grew up in South Side Chicago, the second son of Southerners who came North during the Depression. His parents were of modest means, but when he began playing a neighbor’s piano, they bought a secondhand instrument for him. He quickly showed talent, winning a competition to play a Mozart concerto with the Chicago Symphony at age 11. In high school, Hancock began to play jazz, copying records of the popular pianists of the day. He went to Grinnell College to study engineering; music was too precarious a trade. But after nearly flunking out, he switched to music. A couple of years later, he was gigging in Chicago. Trumpeter Donald Byrd took Hancock under his wing and brought him to New York as a member of his band. Opportunities followed: record sessions, steady work with other bands and a hit record. But the big break was a call from Miles Davis, whose quintet Hancock joined in 1963. This historic band, with Wayne Shorter on sax and Tony Williams on drums, stayed together for five years, and Hancock’s stories of those years are the best in the book. Along the way, he married, traveled the world and began to play electric piano—the first step into a new musical world. After leaving Davis, he began to explore funk, fusion and even hip-hop. He began writing film music, eventually moving to Los Angeles. He also discovered Buddhism, which became a major source of inspiration. Major awards marked his later years, which on the whole highlight a tale of success and fulfillment. The only real low point is an involvement with crack cocaine, which he admits to for the first time in these pages.
A warm, inspiring book by a man who seems to have little ego despite a career spent near the peak of his art. Recommended reading for jazz aficionados.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0670014712
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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