This interesting and authoritative book includes essential facts about the various forms of Japanese music and musical instruments and their place in the overall history of Japan. Japanese Music and Musical Instruments has three main orientations: The history of Japanese music Construction of the instruments Analysis of the music itself. The book covers in a lucidly written text and a wealth of fascinating photographs and drawings the main forms of musical expression. Many readers will find the useful hints on purchasing instruments, records, and books especially valuable, and for those who wish to pursue the matter further there is a selected bibliography and a guide to Tokyo's somewhat hidden world of Japanese music. It will be found an invaluable aid to the understanding and appreciation of an important, but little-known, and fascinating aspect of Japanese culture.

At the second International Song Festival in 1967, Milton Nascimento had three songs accepted for competition. He had no intention of performing them--he hated the idea of intense competition. In fact, Nascimento might never have appeared at all if Eumir Deodato hadn't threatened not to write the arrangements for his songs if he didn't perform at least two of them. Nascimento went on to win the festival's best performer award, all three of his songs were included soon afterward on his first album, and the rest is history. This is only one anecdote from The Brazilian Sound, an encyclopedic survey of Brazilian popular music that ranges over samba, bossa nova, MPB, jazz and instrumental music and tropical rock, as well as the music of the Northeast. The authors have interviewed a wide variety of performers like Nascimento, Gilberto Gil, Carlinhos Brown, and Airto Moreira, U.S. fans, like Lyle Mays, George Duke, and Paul Winter, executive André Midani; and music historian Zuza Homem de Mello, just to name a few. First published in 1991, The Brazilian Sound received enthusiastic attention both in the United States and abroad. For this new edition, the authors have expanded their examination of the historical roots of Brazilian music, added new photographs, amplified their discussion of social issues like racism, updated the maps, and added a new final chapter highlighting the most recent trends in Brazilian music. The authors have expanded their coverage of the axé music movement and included profiles of significant emerging artists like Marisa Monte, Chico Cesar, and Daniela Mercury. Clearly written and lavishly illustrated with 167 photographs, The Brazilian Sound is packed with facts, explanations, and fascinating stories. For the Latin music aficionado or the novice who wants to learn more, the book also provides a glossary, a bibliography, and an extensive discography containing 1,000 entries. Author note: Chris McGowan was a contributing writer and columnist for Billboard from 1984 to 1996 and pioneered that publication's coverage of Brazilian and world music in the mid-1980s. He has written about the arts and other subjects for Musician, The Beat, the Hollywood Reporter, the Los Angeles Times, L. A Weekly, and the Los Angeles Reader. He is the author of Entertainment in the Cyber Zone: Exploring the Interactive Universe of Multimedia (1995) and was a contributor to The Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture (1996). Ricardo Pessanha has worked as a teacher, writer, editor, and management executive for CCAA, one of Brazil's leading institutes of English-language education. He has served as a consultant to foreign journalists and scholars on numerous cultural projects relating to Brazil. He has contributed articles about Brazilian music to The Beat and other publications.

Floyd maintains that while African Americans may not have direct knowledge of African traditions and myths, they can intuitively recognize links to an authentic African cultural memory.

This entertaining history of Cuba and its music begins with the collision of Spain and Africa and continues through the era of Miguelito Valdes, Arsenio Rodriguez, Benny More, and Perez Prado. It offers a behind-the-scenes examination of music from a Cuban point of view, unearthing surprising, provocative connections and making the case that Cuba was fundamental to the evolution of music in the New World. The ways in which the music of black slaves transformed 16th-century Europe, how the "claves" appeared, and how Cuban music influenced ragtime, jazz, and rhythm and blues are revealed. Music lovers will follow this journey from Andalucia, the Congo, the Calabar, Dahomey, and Yorubaland via Cuba to Mexico, Puerto Rico, Saint-Domingue, New Orleans, New York, and Miami. The music is placed in a historical context that considers the complexities of the slave trade; Cuba's relationship to the United States; its revolutionary political traditions; the music of Santeria, Palo, Abakua, and Vodu; and much more.

Introduces the general public to the scholarly debate that has revolutionized Russian music history over the past two decades. Summarizes the new view of Russian music and provides an overview of the relationships between artistic movements and political ideas.

Beginning with the arrival of the first Africans in the English colonies, Eileen Southern weaves a fascinating narrative of intense musical activity. As singers, players, and composers, black American musicians are fully chronicled in this landmark book. Now in the third edition, the author has brought the entire text up to date and has added a wealth of new material covering the latest developments in gospel, blues, jazz, classical, crossover, Broadway, and rap as they relate to African American music.

The classic introduction to the Caribbean's popular music brought up to date.

"Keil's classic account of blues and its artists is both a guide to the development of the music and a powerful study of the blues as an expressive form in and for African American life." -- Amazon.com.

From the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, the U.S. government sought to control practices of music on reservations and in Indian boarding schools. At the same time, Native singers, dancers, and musicians created new opportunities through musical performance to resist and manipulate those same policy initiatives. Why did the practice of music generate fear among government officials and opportunity for Native peoples? In this innovative study, John W. Troutman explores the politics of music at the turn of the twentieth century in three spheres: reservations, off-reservation boarding schools, and public venues such as concert halls and Chautauqua circuits. On their reservations, the Lakotas manipulated concepts of U.S. citizenship and patriotism to reinvigorate and adapt social dances, even while the federal government stepped up efforts to suppress them. At Carlisle Indian School, teachers and bandmasters taught music in hopes of imposing their “civilization” agenda, but students made their own meaning of their music. Finally, many former students, armed with saxophones, violins, or operatic vocal training, formed their own “all-Indian” and tribal bands and quartets and traversed the country, engaging the market economy and federal Indian policy initiatives on their own terms. While recent scholarship has offered new insights into the experiences of “show Indians” and evolving powwow traditions, Indian Blues is the first book to explore the polyphony of Native musical practices and their relationship to federal Indian policy in this important period of American Indian history.