Mostrando resultados por Editor "Blackstone Audio, Inc." en Música

In the raucous, bloody, red-light district of Storyville, New Orleans, in 1907, where 2,000 scarlet women ply their trade, where cocaine and opium are sold over the counter, and where rye whiskey flows like an amber river, there's a killer loose. Someone is murdering Storyville prostitutes and marking each killing with a black rose.

Dangerous Melodies vividly evokes a time when classical music stood at the center of American life, occupying a prominent place in the nation’s culture and politics. The work of renowned conductors, instrumentalists, and singers - and the activities of orchestras and opera companies - were intertwined with momentous international events: two world wars, the rise of fascism, and the Cold War.

February, 1940. After a decade of worldwide depression, World War II had begun in Europe and Asia. With Germany on the march and Japan at war with China, the global crisis was in a crescendo. America's top songwriter, Irving Berlin, had captured the nation's mood a little more than a year before with his patriotic hymn "God Bless America."

The son of a Vanderbilt heiress, John Hammond listened to jazz records with his parents’ servants, went to Harlem as a teenager, and became a regular in clubs where very few white faces ever appeared. Taking a little family money, Hammond went across racial lines in pre-World War II America and came back with recordings of some of the greatest jazz musicians in history. By age twenty-two, he had convinced Benny Goodman to integrate his band and made his first big discovery: Billie Holiday.

Long before the success of his bossa nova Grammy winner “The Girl from Ipanema”, Stan Getz was a fixture in the pantheon of jazz greats. From his recording of “Early Autumn” with the Woody Herman band in 1949, which catapulted him to stardom at age 22, to the 1961 jazz/classical masterpiece “Focus”, to the 1990 release of “Apasionado”, Getz’s 49-year career is a tale of enduring artistic success in the midst of a troubled life.

In clear and entertaining prose, Plotkin explores a thousand years of music, introduces listeners to more than 100 great works, and profiles in depth many significant composers, including Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Dvoxak, and Mahler. He describes all the musical instruments in the orchestra, defines major musical terms, and makes music theory comprehensible for the uninitiated. There are also conversations with important musicians who offer fascinating insights about their art.

The Los Angeles Times affectionately referred to Freddy Powers as the "Ol Blue Eyes' of Country Music" and wrote that if you were to "ask country superstars Willie Nelson, George Jones or Merle Haggard (they'll)...tell you that he's one of country music's best-kept secrets". The Texas Country Music Hall of Fame inductee has been to the top of the charts as both a producer for Willie Nelson's Grammy-winning LP Over the Rainbow and a songwriter for many of country music legend Merle Haggard's number one hits.

Over the years, and through the release of more than a dozen studio albums, Leonard Cohen gained a reputation as a dazzlingly literate and consistently daring songwriter. His status as a cult artist grew and solidified, all over the world. Now, Stranger Music brings together, for the first time in one volume, a generous selection of Leonard Cohen's song lyrics and poetry. Stranger Music reveals the range and depth of Cohen's work. It is a long-overdue celebration of his extraordinary gift for language that speaks with rare clarity, passion, and timelessness.

Internationally celebrated for his writing and his music, Leonard Cohen is revered as one of the great writers, performers, and most consistently daring artists of our time. Now available on audio for the first time, the poems in Book of Mercy brim with praise, despair, anger, doubt, and trust. Speaking from the heart of the modern world, yet in tones that resonate with an older devotional tradition, these verses give voice to our deepest, most powerful intuitions. 

In this collection of poems and song lyrics that have never been published before, we see the world through Johnny Cash's eyes and view his reflection on his own interior reality, his frailties and his strengths alike. In his hallmark voice, he pens verses about love, pain, freedom, and mortality, and expresses insights on culture, his family, his fame, even Christmas. Forever Words confirms Johnny Cash as a brilliant and singular American literary figure. His music is a part of our collective history, and here the depth of his artistry and talent become even more evident.

Drawing on his own life and career and the rich lore of The Lion King, Alton Fitzgerald White, Broadway's longest-running "King", delivers his message of service - taking responsibility for and deriving happiness from commonplace achievements - as a philosophy that anyone can get through each day with satisfaction, pride, and a sense of accomplishment.

Cowboys and Indies is the definitive record-business bible, chronicling the pioneers who set the stylus on the most important labelsand musical discoveries of the last century. The narrative follows all the musical trends and developments from the phonograph to the Internet age as it delves behind the big business of corporate hit machines and the diligent industry of small, curated labels.

Miles to Go is a frank and intimate exploration of Miles Davis' eccentric working life, drug habits, paranoia, depression, and subsequent recovery. Murphy explores Davis' troubled relationship with his children and the controversial role Cicely Tyson played in his life. The book also delves into the dynamics that made Davis' band work so well together, placing Davis' work in a historic, literary, and musical framework.

In his lectures (including an acclaimed TED talk) and now in this audiobook, Talgam shows why imposing your vision on your people is likely to backfire. Great conductors may know in advance how they want a piece to be played, but they make room for the creativity and passion of their musicians. They respect the gap between the baton and the instruments. They focus more on listening than on speaking.

For Marcia Davenport, the research and writing of Mozart was truly a labor of love, during which she retraced every journey he made, saw every dwelling (then extant) in which he had ever lived, every theatre where his works were first performed, and every library and museum where his manuscripts were then to be seen. In this eloquent work of historical reconstruction, Davenport lets her characters tell their own stories.

David Hajdu begins Love for Sale, his personal history of recorded pop music, in an unexpected place - not with nostalgic reminiscences of the 45s of his youth but with the sheet music era at the end of the 19th century. It was not so much the beginning of popular music - many songs were already popular - as it was the beginning of the popular music industry. And if he's going to understand what his 45s meant to him, this is the place to start.

Jazz 101 is a fascinating entry into the world of jazz, for the beginner, novice, or jazz enthusiast. Szwed takes listeners on a tour of the varied and nonlinear history of jazz, exploring how it developed from an ethnic music to become America's most popular music and then part of the avant-garde in less than 50 years.

April of 1958 - the Iron Curtain was at its heaviest, and the outcome of the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition seemed preordained. Nonetheless, as star musicians from across the globe descended on Moscow, an unlikely favorite emerged: Van Cliburn, a polite, lanky Texan whose passionate virtuosity captured the Russian spirit. This is the story of what unfolded that spring - for Cliburn and the other competitors, jurors, party officials, and citizens of the world who were touched by the outcome.

The heroic story of Pussy Riot, who resurrected the power of truth in a society built on lies. On February 21, 2012, five young women entered the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. In neon-colored dresses, tights, and balaclavas, they performed a “punk prayer” beseeching the “Mother of God” to “get rid of Putin.” They were quickly shut down by security, and in the weeks and months that followed, three of the women were arrested and tried, and two were sentenced to a remote prison colony. But the incident captured international headlines, and footage of it went viral.

A fan from the moment the Doors’ first album took over KMPX, the revolutionary FM rock ’n’ roll station in San Francisco, Greil Marcus saw the band many times at the legendary Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom in 1967. Five years later it was all over. Forty years after singer Jim Morrison was found dead in Paris and the group disbanded, one could drive from here to there, changing from one FM pop station to another, and be all but guaranteed to hear two, three, four of the Doors’ songs in an hour - every hour.