by Paul Tingen ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001
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
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
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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