Two for the Blues: 

• Mississippi The Blues Today by Robert Nicholson


• Miles Davis's KIND OF BLUE and the Remaking of Modern Music --The Blue Moment  by Richard Williams   PAPERBACK 

Mississippi The Blues Today by Robert Nicholson

The Blues, that unique form of African-American music, continues to hold a fascination with each successive generation of young people. Scots-born Londoner Robert Nicholson is just one such person. Grabbed first as a teenager by the white blues sounds of the Rolling Stones and George Thorogood, he quickly became aware of the real roots of the Blues. Inspired by the great Chicago musicians Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and B. B. King and the Mississippi Blues originators Robert Johnson and Charlie Patton, the author embarked on a journey to trace the roots of the electric sounds of Chicago’s Chess record label back to the Mississippi Delta itself, the birthplace of the Blues.Together with Memphis-based photographer, Logan Young, Robert Nicholson has conducted a series of extended field trips to the South. Their travels have brought them into contact with the Blues musicians of today. This book presents in words and images a behind-the-scenes, often intimate, portrait of the main players on the current Delta Blues scene, including Lonnie Pitchford, Booba Barnes, Scott Dunbar, Son Thomas, and others. This important book gives a vivid account of an economically impoverished people and examines the often brittle conviviality, hidden racial tensions, and undercurrents of violence from which the Blues has grown and in which it continues to thrive. The stunning original photographs by Logan Young enhance Nicholson’s informative, entertaining, and thought-provoking text. Together they present a unique sociological and musical picture of the Mississippi Blues, and of the ways it has endured and evolved in contemporary America.

Miles Davis's KIND OF BLUE and the Remaking of Modern Music --The Blue Moment  by Richard William

A brilliant, wide-ranging book on how the seminal album revolutionized music and culture in the twentieth century.

“It is the most singular of sounds, yet among the most ubiquitous. It is the sound of isolation that has sold itself to millions.” Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue is the best-selling piece of music in jazz history and, for many listeners, among the most haunting works of the twentieth century. It is also, notoriously, the only jazz album many people own. Recorded in 1959 (in nine miraculous hours), there has been nothing like it since. Richard Williams’s “richly informative” (The Guardian) history considers the album within its wider cultural context, showing how the record influenced such diverse artists as Steve Reich and the Velvet Underground. 

This book is part of a library donation by Dan Connolly.  All books are used but in almost new condition.