From Bowie to the Blues

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Bowie on Bowie: Interviews and Encounters with David Bowie (Chicago Review Press), edited by Sean Egan

Bowie on Bowie, a curated collection of interviews with David Bowie from 1969 through 2003, will interest fans but also speaks to a phenomenon of Bowie’s peak years, the ’70s, when what rock stars said was often as interesting as what they played. Bowie on Bowie is full of gems. Who knew, for example, that he planned to produce Devo?

A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music (University of Illinois Press), by Robert Marovich

Chicago, the destination for many African Americans fleeing violence and poverty in the South, was where the old spirituals were transformed. Robert Marovich’s magisterial account explores how the encounter with urban life infused gospel music with blues and jazz, without displacing old habits of ecstatic worship brought from Africa and baptized by encountering Christianity.

Music is Forever: Dizzy Gillespie, the Jazz Legend, and Me (Red Anchor Productions), by Dave Usher with Berl Falbaum

Dave Usher made his living in hazardous materials but jazz was his vocation; he produced recordings by Ramsey Lewis and Ahmad Jamal, but his proudest moments were spent with bebop giant Dizzy Gillespie. In his rambling, heartfelt first-person account, Usher recalls meeting the trumpeter as a star-struck 14-year-old and the friendship they enjoyed until Gillespie’s death. They were, he says, an odd couple, a black Bahia and a white Jew drawn together through music.

So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead (Da Capo Press), by David Browne

As Rolling Stone’s David Browne admits early on, one of the first albums he owned was by The Grateful Dead. He’s an unabashed fan who set out to interview surviving band members and camp followers, many with conflicting or hazy memories. The Dead has already been extensively documented, but Browne picks up a few new stories and nails down some loose dates.

Sounds of the New Deal: The Federal Music Project in the West (University of Illinois Press), by Peter Gough

During the Great Depression, the federal government put unemployed classical musicians to work at low-cost concerts, but ultimately employed musicians of all sorts and delved into music education and documentation. Sounds of the New Deal investigates a project often eclipsed by better-remembered programs for stage actors, visual artists and writers. Peter Gough has written a revealing look at the social and political power of music as well as the good that can come from federal support of the arts.

Spirits Rejoice! Jazz and American Religion (Oxford University Press), by Jason C. Bivins

A jazz guitarist and religious studies professor at North Carolina State, Jason C. Bivins brings enthusiasm, even passion to his study. Spirits Rejoice! investigates how Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Baha’ism, Buddhism and, in the case of Sun Ra, self-made religion, has been integral to the creativity of many jazz musicians. Some players are simply steeped in a particular ethic or draw inspiration from a certain tradition while others are in search of lost chords and new sources of harmony.

We’ll Have Manhattan: The Early Work of Rodgers and Hart (Oxford University Press), by Dominic Symonds

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart set out to write songs for musical theater that worked within the dramatic structure of the productions. But many of those songs are gems in their own right and became standards through countless interpretations. Dominic Symonds examines their formative years from 1919 through the 1930s and sees Rodgers and Hart as crucial to the development of distinctly American songwriting, untethered from European influences and drawn toward jazz and the nervous rhythms of modernity.

Words Without Music: A Memoir (Liveright Publishing), by Philip Glass

As a teenager on a long train ride, Philip Glass noticed how “the wheels on the tracks made endless patterns.” That insight, along with his studies in Indian and other non-Western music, and the chamber music he absorbed in his youth, are the streams that feed his compositions. Words Without Music is an unusually engaging memoir, an intellectual and spiritual autobiography as well as an account of his life in music.

Yoknapatawpha Blues: Faulkner’s Fiction and Southern Roots Music (Louisiana State University Press), by Tim A. Ryan

Although separated by only a few miles, William Faulkner and Charlie Patton were probably unaware of each other. If linking the modernist author and the Delta bluesman seems a stretch, Tim A. Ryan pulls it off with surprising brilliance. He shows how both artists addressed similar themes and rendered conventional material “in startlingly innovative terms,” embracing multiple truths in a single line and helping redefine the possibilities of literature and lyrics.