Ray Brown Was an Elder Statesman of Jazz
Bassist Ray Brown navigated changing trends in jazz while upholding high standards, creating some of the finest music in the jazz repertoire.
Features, reviews, interviews, and lists about books including cultural commentary and history, non-fiction, literature, and more.
Bassist Ray Brown navigated changing trends in jazz while upholding high standards, creating some of the finest music in the jazz repertoire.
Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Faulkner’s “The Bear” deliberately confuse and disquiet our comprehension of slavery’s traumatic past.
Chris DeVille’s cultural commentary about the indie rock explosion, Such Great Heights, covers new ground and proves to be an entertaining read from a credible source.
Humor writer John Patrick Higgins talks about the fading art of painful self-deprecation and other sore subjects in his new “Misery Memoir”, Spine.
SoCal punk music history book Tearing Down the Orange Curtain has gobs of literary equivalents to falling off the stage.
In this attention economy, where shock pays dividends and subtlety is a liability, the stripper is a cultural archetype, the influencer a high priest of exposure.
In the clear-eyed and sophisticated memoir Love In Exile, British journalist Shon Faye mines from her life and the past to interrogate why we’re denied, or we deny, love.
With his taste and track record, music producer Tom Wilson deserves the kind of fame afforded to his contemporaries Phil Spector and George Martin.
Juan José Millás’ Only Smoke explores the relationship between meaning and observation.
In a typical biography, I’d permit ten pages that are completely unrelated to the subject. The Story of ABBA has about 100 such pages.
Fitz-James O’Brien’s exuberantly morbid stories, set amongst mid-century New York’s boarding houses and alleyways, are works of comic skepticism and cosmic messiness.
Tourmaline’s biography of Marsha P. Johnson urges readers to witness the complexity and collective power of Black trans life.