A valuable revisionist look at one of the key figures of modern American music.
Scottish music critic Tingen examines the controversial second half of Miles Davis's career, when he performed with electric bands.
One of the household names of jazz, Davis virtually invented the vocabulary of modern trumpet playing. But in the mid-1960s, on the album Bitches Brew, he added electric guitars and keyboards to his band and lost many of his original fans, who accused him of pandering to the rock-’n’-roll crowd. Tingen, whose background is in rock criticism, argues that Davis's later music, far from being a sell-out, arose from a serious attempt to incorporate the idioms of contemporary African-American music into the trumpeter's vocabulary. In support of this, he interviews many members of Davis's bands during that era. Their testimony sheds interesting light on Davis's approach. As a leader, he tended to assemble a group in whose abilities he felt confident, then throw them on their own resources by taking them into the recording studio with no advance notice of the material to be performed. The author makes a convincing case that Davis's openness to a variety of musical idioms harks back to his early days in blues-oriented bands and as a sideman to Charlie Parker. Tingen also provides a comprehensive list of Davis's supporting musicians and of his concert and recording activity during the latter half of his career, as well as insights into the trumpeter's troubled private life. The comments on specific performances tend toward the impressionistic. While unlikely to convince hard-core jazz fans that Davis's electric experiments deserve close listening, Tingen does make a good case for the continuity of the trumpeter's vision and for the importance and influence of the music he played in the ’60s and after.
A valuable revisionist look at one of the key figures of modern American music.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8230-8346-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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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