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Australian Book Retailer of the Year 2021
John Szwed
The first biography of Harry Smith, the brilliant eccentric who transformed twentieth-century art and culture.
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Named one of the Best Books of 2023 by the New Yorker and The New York Times' Dwight Garner
"The first comprehensive biography of this hipster magus…
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Quite possibly the most inspirational music biography ever written - essential. MUZIK
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Drawing on a vast amount of new material that has surfaced in the last decade, … jazz writer John Szwed considers how [Holiday’s] life inflected her art, her influences, her…
John F. Szwed’s Space is the Place is the definitive biography of Sun Ra-composer, keyboardist, bandleader, philosopher, entrepreneur, poet, self-proclaimed extraterrestrial from Saturn, and a founder of Afrofuturism.
Crossovers brings together four decades of popular and academic writings by folklorist, anthropologist, and jazz scholar John Szwed.
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Today, Billie Holiday is an icon - an artist whose voice has weathered countless shifts in public taste, and whose impact on contemporary music is unquestionable.
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Provides an explanation of the basic elements of jazz, traverses the genre’s history to see how it evolved, and profiles its key figures, theories, controversies, and role in American culture.
John F. Szwed
Miles Davis regularly changed styles, leaving his impact on many forms of jazz, whether he created them or simply developed the work of others, from modal jazz and be-bop, his…
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Alan Lomax is best remembered as the man who introduced folk music to the masses. Featuring a cast of characters that includes Eleanor Roosevelt and Bob Dylan, Szwed’s fascinating biography…
He was an anthropologist, filmmaker, painter, folklorist, mystic, and walking encyclopedia. He taught Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe about the occult, swapped drugs with Timothy Leary, sat at the piano…
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John F. Szwed,Grover Gardner
Jazz 101 makes jazz, with all its intricacies of artistry and vast array of forms, accessible to readers through Szwed’s fluid, entertaining prose. Infinitely readable and highly entertaining, Jazz 101…
Jazz 101 is a fascinating entree into the world of jazz, for the beginner, novice, or jazz enthusiast. Szwed takes listeners on a tour of the varied and nonlinear history…
A group of our country’s most distinguished intellectuals dismantles the alleged scientific foundations and criticizes the alarming public policy conclusions of the incendiary book, The Bell Curve. All those concerned…
Arthur Huff Fauset
Details accounts of early spiritual black movements and their beliefs and practices. This title reveals the origins of such significant modern African American religious groups as the Nation of Islam…
Roger Abrahams
A furious, blues-tinged, erudite hymn to our greatest vernacular city. Read it and weep; read it and rejoice! -Edward Hirsch, President, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Clyde E. B. Bernhardt
I Remember is a first-hand account of the world of black American music told by a man who has been part of that world for eighty years. Clyde E. B…
Henry H Glassie,Edward D. Ives,John F. Szwed
Three prominent folklorists wrote these essays in the 1970s about Dorrance Weir of upstate New York and his song Take that Night Train to Selma, Joe Scott of Maine and…
