Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer: Colin Grant follows the founding fathers of reggae on a musical and historical journey deep into Jamaican culture, emerging with revealing insights into the spiritual and material paths these three visionaries charted. Getting the reclusive Bunny Wailer to talk on record about the seminal band formed by the trio is a coup that makes this an especially important read for music lovers.

This is an age of marvelous memoirs from rockers of a certain vintage:  Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Patti Smith. Now comes a standout entry from a slightly younger musician. Bob Mould, born 1960, came to prominence during the mid-80s with his band Hüsker Dü. He lays bare the trials and tribulations behind the trio's success, and charts his subsequent solo career with insightful poetry and a gravitas that matches his famous sonic assaults.

David Browne documents the recording of four landmark albums in 1970--Let It Be by The Beatles, Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon & Garfunkel, Sweet Baby James by James Taylor, and Déjà Vu by Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young. But what this colorful, captivating blend of history and music criticism really depicts is the end of the heady, idealistic energy of the 1960s and the beginning of a new era of rock & roll.

In this large-format, striking volume, Andrew Zuckerman combines words and pictures to evoke the power of music. With stunning photographic portraits and telling interviews with 50 musicians—including Fiona Apple, David Crosby, Philip Glass, Herbie Hancock, Ozzie Osbourne, Kid Rock, Iggy Pop, and Itzhak Perlman—Zuckerman examines the meanings and mysteries of creating, performing, and listening.

In his own lifetime, Gustav Mahler was a celebrated conductor whose massive symphonic works were tolerated with barely veiled embarrassment by the musical cognoscenti. Norman Lebrecht explains why they were wrong, and how Mahler's musical imagination has informed and changed our culture in the century since his death.

Pulitzer-winning historian (and Grammy-nominated liner note scribe) Sean Wilentz provides a revelatory mapping of the roots and branches—and even the knotholes—of Bob Dylan's American art. Personal, analytical, and compelling.

Love songs steeped in loveliness by two jazz luminaries, Keith Jarret and Charlie Haden. The relaxed affinty of pianist and bassist elicits emotional eloquence from such standards as "For All We Know," "Goodbye," and "Body and Soul." Read more...

The original 1967 collaboration between Frank Sinatra and Antonio Carlos Jobim, the Brazilian musician whose compositions were the best international ambassadors of bossanova, is quite simply one of the most beautiful realizations of popular music you'll ever come upon. In Rio slang "bossa" means "shrewdness," and Sinatra, recognizing no doubt that the new shrewdness, in its gentle, intimate undulations of sound and sense, gave fresh life to the old one, of which he was past master, tums in the most concentrated performances of his later career. This welcome reissue includes ten tracks from a less well-known session recorded two years later, with arrangements by Eumir Deodato; it's not quite as good as the first set, but then almost nothing is. Read more...

A composition without any music -- or any composed sound at all -- John Cage's 4'33" is so simple that it resonates with a symphonic array of aesthetic and philosophical issues, as Kyle Gann illustrates in this intriguing book. Read more...

The Chieftains enlist the help of Ry Cooder to explore the legacy of the San Patricios, a band of immigrant soldiers who, in 1846, deserted the American army during the Mexican-American War to fight for the other side. The result is part historical expedition, part cultural inquiry, and -- in its entirety -- a musically ebullient festival of creative imagination. Read more...

Johnny Mercer’s lyrics set the highest standards in the American songbook. Collaborating with Hoagy Carmichael, Harry Warren, Harold Arlen, and Jerome Kern, among many others, he set unforgettable words to some of the most memorable melodies in popular music... Read more...