book reviews
-
On The Drumming Of Tony Allen
In his memoir Tony Allen: An Autobiography of the Master Drummer of Afrobeat (co-authored with Michael Veal, Duke University Press, 2013), the eminent Nigerian drummer recalls the influence of American jazz innovators on his own musicianship. It was in the playing of the African Americans such as Elvin Jones, Art Blakey, and Max Roach that… Continue reading
-
On Ken Dryden’s “The Game”
When my brother and I were kids, we spent a lot of time playing ball hockey in the driveway, taking shots at one another with a fluorescent orange “sting” ball that really did sting when it was frozen from the cold and hitting you in the face. One of our always followed conventions of the… Continue reading
-
On The Lessons Of Antifragility For Creativity: Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “Antifragile”
“We know more than we think we do, a lot more than we can articulate” (35) – Nassim Nicholas Taleb I used to resist randomly exploring some aspect of music software–an instrument, a sound, an effect, a sequencer–because I wanted to have a sense ahead of time where I was headed. (Good luck with that… Continue reading
-
Insect Thrumming As Deep Music: On David Rothenberg’s “Bug Music”
“One sound can be enough if it repeats enough enough enough times so the meaning becomes subservient to the sound”–David Rothenberg, Bug Music (114) There is a powerful idea behind David Rothenberg’s spirited recent book, Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm And Noise, which is this: listening to the rhythmic and buzzing sounds of… Continue reading
-
Musical Resonances: On Nate Silver’s The Signal And The Noise
The gist of Nate Silver’s excellent The Signal and the Noise (2012) is that in order to make good predictions about the world we need to learn to think probabilistically. Delving into a range of rigorous case studies ranging from baseball and presidential elections to the stock market, poker playing, global warming and terrorism, Silver… Continue reading
-
On David Byrne’s “How Music Works”
It’s hard to keep track of all the things David Byrne does. He’s the former front man of the Talking Heads, of course, but also a singer-songwriter who has collaborated with musicians from all over the world, a record label founder, a sound art installation artist, a designer, a visual artist, a photographer,a bicycle enthusiast,… Continue reading
-
On Musical Texts: T.M. Wolf’s “Sound”
T.M. Wolf’s Sound is a novel that merges writerly form and narrative content to approximate the ambiguities and instabilities of how we think and talk–not in books but in the real world. Content-wise, Sound‘s story is simple enough: Cincy Stiles, a disaffected philosophy graduate school drop out, returns to his hometown on the Jersey shore… Continue reading
brettworks 
You must be logged in to post a comment.