Sinatra. Streisand. Dylan. Pavarotti. McCartney. Sting. Madonna. What do these musicians have in common besides their super-stardom? They have all worked with legendary music producer Phil Ramone.For almost five decades, Phil Ramone has been a force in the music industry. He has produced records and collaborated with almost every major talent in the business. There is a craft to making records, and Phil has spent his life mastering it. For the first time ever, he s...

Featuring 100 photographs of Frank Sinatra working with orchestras and arrangers, listening to playbacks, and, of course, singing, this book tells the whole story of how he created the Sinatra sound and translated the most intense personal emotions into richly worked-out songs of unrivalled expressiveness. One of the thrills of listening to Sinatra is wondering how he did it—and this book explains it all, bringing the dedicated fan and the casual music lover alike into the recording studio...

Now in paperback, after five hardcover printings, Tommy James’s wild and entertaining true story of his career—part rock & roll fairytale, part valentine to a bygone era, and part mob epic—that “reads like a music-industry version of Goodfellas” (The Denver Post).Everyone knows the hits: “Hanky Panky,” “Mony Mony,” “I Think We’re Alone Now,” “Crimson and Clover,” “Crystal Blue Persuasion.” All of these songs, which epitomize great pop music of the...

In 1915, Thomas Edison proclaimed that he could record a live performance and reproduce it perfectly, shocking audiences who found themselves unable to tell whether what they were hearing was an Edison Diamond Disc or a flesh-and-blood musician. Today, the equation is reversed. Whereas Edison proposed that a real performance could be rebuilt with absolute perfection, Pro Tools and digital samplers now allow musicians and engineers to create the illusion of performances that never were. In ...

Alan Cross is the preeminent chronicler of popular music.Here he provides a history of electronic pioneers Depeche Mode.This look at the group -- "Music for the Masses--and Then Some" -- is adapted from the audiobook of the same name.

In this compulsively readable, fascinating, and provocative guide to classical music, Norman Lebrecht, one of the world’s most widely read cultural commentators tells the story of the rise of the classical recording industry from Caruso’s first notes to the heyday of Bernstein, Glenn Gould, Callas, and von Karajan.Lebrecht compellingly demonstrates that classical recording has reached its end point–but this is not simply an expos? of decline and fall. It is, for the first time, the...

"A winning look at the stories behind 45 pop, punk, folk, soul and country classics" in the words of Mick Jagger, Stevie Wonder, Cyndi Lauper and more ( The Washington Post).Every great song has a fascinating backstory. And here, writer and music historian Marc Myers brings to life five decades of music through oral histories of forty-five era-defining hits woven from interviews with the artists who created them, including such legendary tunes as the Isley...

The life of Nina Simone is one of blocked paths and surprising detours. Some people are born to an obvious destiny, only to find that society, circumstance, and chance steer them onto an entirely different course. Had Nina been born at a different time, she could very well have been a superstar of classical music at an early age. However, the severe oppression of African Americans in the United States during the 1950s forced her to find her fate down a different road. That she did so with ...

Everything you could possibly know about Verdi and his operas, from the brilliant and humorous author of Wagner Without Fear.If you want to know why La traviata was actually a flop at its premiere in 1853, it's in here. If you want to know why claiming to have heard Bjorling's Chicago performance of Il trovatore is the classic opera fan faux pas, it's in here. Even if you just want to know how to pronounce Aida, or what the plot o...

The first biography of Yo La Tengo, the massively influential band who all but defined indie music.Yo La Tengo has lit up the indie scene for three decades, part of an underground revolution that defied corporate music conglomerates, eschewed pop radio, and found a third way. Going behind the scenes of one of the most remarkable eras in American music history, Big Day Coming traces the patient rise of husband-and-wife team Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, wh...

A collection of essays, biographical profiles, and critical analyses by one of the twentieth century's leading jazz writers includes commentary on the work of jazz entertainers, including Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, and Louis Armstrong, as well as assessment of the role of jazz in contemporary culture and its influence on modern music.

The first title in our Laurier Digital Imprint.Representing Sound elucidates the base technical ontology, the machine essence, of every recorded musical communication. In so doing, it suggests the broad contours of an unprecedented theoretical basis for considering recording practice that posits no fundamental relationship between it and live performance. Representing Sound thus complicates common conceptions of sound to include different ontological state...