Music

DownBeat magazine has assembled into a 350-odd-page book nearly all of its Miles Davis coverage in three sections devoted to news, features, and reviews. No artist was covered so thoroughly in the magazine; Miles's intelligence, talent, charisma, and charming pugnacity always made him a fascinating subject.

And who could blame him for his defensiveness? The earliest news items in "The Miles Davis Reader" recount a 1959 altercation involving Miles and a police officer. The episode escalated into a threatened wrongful arrest suit against the City of New York. Fearing future harassment should the suit be pursuit, Miles let the matter drop when he was cleared of all charges.

Miles was an irrespressible critic in the several "Blindfold Tests" he submitted to over the years. In a particularly spiky 1964 encounter, he brutalizes Les McCann and the Jazz Crusaders ("What's that supposed to be? That ain't nothin'"), Clark Terry ("I've always liked Clark. But this is a sad record"), and a trio consisting of Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach ("Duke can't play with them, and they can't play with Duke") in the course of a single session.

One writer visited Miles at the Johnny Coulton Physical Training Club, where he boxed, and the interview got physical. Another saw Miles at home and described a bedroom he'd never want to leave. A third wondered what Davis had been listening to lately. "Nobody—I listen to Stockhausen," Miles replied, referring to avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who died on Dec. 5, 2007. Reviews range from enthusiasm to adulation, except for an early-'70s valley of disdain for Miles's electric experiments. However, this was rectified when the performances were reissued during the '80s via some inciteful reconsiderations.

Davis's evolving sartorial panache can be appreciated in DownBeat's cover designs, which likewise devolved from cool to groovy to gaudy.

"A New Day..." is done. After 717 performances since March 25, 2003, Celine Dion concluded her Las Vegas residency at Caesar's Palace with a Saturday-night farewell. Caesar's invested $95 million in a 4,100-seat theater for the melodramatic French-Canadian singer, who overcame poor early reviews to eventually gross more than $400 million from the sales of some 3 million tickets. She easily earned out her initial $100 million, three-year contract, the largest sum of any Vegas act to date. "A New Day...," the DVD, was released last week, Bette Midler moves into the room in February, and Dion will soon tour the world to promote her recent album, "Taking Chances."

To non-fans, Celine is probably most memorable for this highly emotional September 23, 2005, interview with Larry King, when she seemed to encourage New Orleans looters following the levee failure in New Orleans. "Let them touch these things!," she urged regarding the jeans and TV sets being stolen.

As an artist, Dion is a polarizing figure for fans and critics alike. Worshipped by millions for her emotional generosity, she is considered bland and corporate by just as many detractors. Canadian music writer Carl Wilson uses Dion's most popular album as lightning rod for his fascinating meditation on aesthetics, fandom, and loathing in "Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste." Wilson's title is the latest in Continuum's terrific 33 1/3 series of books, each devoted to an entire album, and he covers more ground than most. He talks to fans and critics. He studies demographic research on Dion's audience. He submits an extensive "Let's Talk About Love" review. He thinks long and hard and well about why we love and hate the divas we do, in whatever forms they may take. He even visits Vegas to attend "A New Day...," about which he writes:

"The songs of devotion—'If You Asked Me To' or 'Because You Loved Me'—began to probe the open sore of my own recent marital separation, and even coaxed a few tears. For a few moments, I got it. Of course, then Celine would do something unforgivable, like a duet with an enormous projection of the head of the late Frank Sinatra. Still, I could see the point of her in Vegas, land of ejaculating slot machines and flows of global capital through artificial rivers. Let them touch these things!"

Could we ever know too much about the Beatles? New connections seem to emerge every time someone reorganizes the myriad pieces of their four intertwined jigsaw puzzles into a new book or movie. Jonathan Gould's many-years-in-the-making "Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America" is the best overall biography to emerge since "The Beatles" (2005), Bob Spitz's stab at painting the big group picture. In his own information-packed 600-plus pages, Gould relates the Beatles' myth in the context of twentieth-century history and culture. Why the Beatles should have existed precisely when they did is backed up by relatively long stretches devoted to the concept of charisma, the British government sex scandals of the sixties, recording technology, and so on. As a musician himself, Gould is particularly excellent at unpacking the technical qualities that make the Beatles sound so appealing, and he does so in an extremely accessible, readable, and detailed manner. For example: "The long fade of 'You Never Give Me Your Money' ends in a hush of tape-looped night sounds, peepers, and wind chimes that set the stage for the burbling guitar, muffled cymbals, and thumping rhythm of 'Sun King,' which rises like mist on a lake."

When it comes to track-by-accounts of the Beatles, however, Gould doesn't quite match the obsession of the third and final edition of Ian MacDonald's "Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties." In a long introduction, MacDonald writes, "The Sixties seem like a golden age to us because, relative to now, they were." And whether you agree with his assessment or not, you have to give it up for his detailed accounts of the nearly 200 Beatles studio tracks that follow in the order in which they were recorded. The refreshingly opinionated writer's assessments run from the highly laudatory ("With its parallel movement three-part chorus, interlocking drum part, and fiercely angular slide guitar solo...'Drive My Car' is among the group's most closely arranged records and remains one of the most effective starting tracks to any of their albums") to cattily dismissive (he characterizes "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" as a "lapse into tub-thumping banality"). Together, these Beatles books should provide as much data as you'll ever need—at least until the next one.

Los Angeles writer-archivist-DJ Roger Steffens has been one of the most assiduous champions of reggae music for at least three decades. Indeed, Carlos Santana refers to him as St. Peter to Bob Marley's Jesus Christ on the back cover of "Reggae Scrapbook," Steffens's fabulous new coffee-table collaboration with photographer Peter Simon. Over the years, Steffens has known and interviewed everyone who's anyone in Jamaican music, and his scrapbook boasts touching, funny, and illuminating encounters with the likes of Jimmy Cliff, Toots Hibbert, Burning Spear, Peter Tosh, Dennis Brown, and, of course, Bob Marley.

Moreover, "Reggae Scrapbook" almost literally bursts at the seams with memorabilia from Roger's deep reggae archive. In addition to Simon's stunning photography and countless collaged posters, autographed album covers, and other ephemera, the memory book overflows with autographed photos tipped onto pages, perfect facsimiles of "yard party" announcements tucked into pockets, envelopes containing postcards of all things Rastafarian, clever reproductions of autographed singles, and lots more. And the enclosed DVD containing highlights of Steffens's Los Angeles cable-television interviews with Tosh, Judy Mowatt, Luciano, and the Wailers Band alone is probably worth the price. "Reggae Scrapbook" is a rich and colorful testament to one of the more rewarding, strange, and influential eras in the history of popular music.

It's a rather long piece divided into 24 pages (click on "print" to get it all at once), but you'll want to slow down and savor all 12,000 words of "The Musical Mystique," Richard Taruskin's defense of classical music against its advocates, in The New Republic. The University of Southern California-Berkeley professor and author of "The Oxford History of Western Music" feels that three recent books—such as Julian Johnson's "Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value," Joshua Fineberg's "Classical Music, Why Bother? Hearing the World of Contemporary Culture Through a Composer's Ears," and Lawrence Kramer's "Why Classical Music Still Matters"—overstate the alleged crisis in classical music; he writes:

As with rising gorge I consumed these books, the question that throbbed and pounded in my head was whether it was still possible to defend my beloved repertoire without recourse to pious tommyrot, double standards, false dichotomies, smug nostalgia, utopian delusions, social snobbery, tautology, hypocrisy, trivialization, pretense, innuendo, reactionary invective, or imperial haberdashery.

As a team of Texas researchers have recently announced, there are exactly 237 known reasons why people have sex. There are at least as many reasons why they listen to classical music, of which to sit in solemn silence on a dull dark dock is only one. There will always be social reasons as well as purely aesthetic ones, and thank God for that. There will always be people who make money from it—and why not?—as well as those who starve for the love of it. Classical music is not dying; it is changing. (My favorite example right now is Gabriel Prokofiev, the British-born grandson of the Russian composer, who studied electronic music in school, has headed a successful disco-punk band, and is now writing string quartets.) Change can be opposed, and it can be slowed down, but it cannot be stopped. All three of our authors seem reluctant to acknowledge this ineluctable fact. But change is not always loss, and realizing this should not threaten but console.

Everything changed for jazz giant John Coltrane when he sobered up and kicked heroin in May 1957. Having been fired by Miles Davis for unprofessional behavior in April, the saxophonist turned his life around and joined Thelonious Monk's quartet that summer. (Blue Note has sold more than 370,000 copies of the thoroughly enchanting "Thelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall" since its 2005 release.) Ben Ratliff, jazz critic for The New York Times, offers his own sober assessment of Coltrane's sound, style, and influence in "Coltrane: The Story of a Sound," a two-part tale. Part one is a fairly standard biography concentrating on Coltrane the working musician. Part two, however, focuses first on Coltrane as a musical sponge, soaking up the influences around him. He distilled them into the most influential sonic essence of his generation up to and following his premature death in 1967 at age 40.

Coltrane evolved from a lucid bebopper and cool swinger into a pop experimentalist (with "My Favorite Things") before cutting a thoroughly original path into the spiritual beyond in records such as "A Love Supreme." Coltrane, according to Ratliff, was driven to express the sounds he heard in his head, no matter what the consequences or cost. Fortunately, Coltrane found the band to execute those sounds. He may have been obsessed, not to mention a little depressed, but he left an apparently unalterable signature of fleeting notes on the way jazz is heard and performed today.

I'm getting a kick out of Coltrane, the sideman, as heard on "Interplay," a five-CD box set of under-rehearsed sessions he recorded for Prestige between 1956 and 1958 with the so-called Prestige All-Stars, pianist Mal Waldron and guitarist Kenny Burrell. Coltrane's famous recovery took place between discs three and four, so compare and contrast.

Alex Ross's hefty and wonderful new book, "The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century," begins with an almost literal cliff-hanger: Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler visiting a waterfall and enjoying lunch prior to Strauss conducting his opera "Salome" that evening in the Austrian city of Granz. That bucolic scene sets the stage for a wild, densely plotted ride through a century's worth of creative jousting among the (gotta say it) exclusively white and male titans of classical music. The New Yorker magazine's music critic has a brilliant knack for distilling entire careers into elegant portraits, which he etches into the epic context of a world descending into war and fascism before reemerging into something new and strange and yet to be resolved. This passage about Béla Bartók's "Concerto for Orchestra" (1942-45) offers a nice example of how Ross illuminates a specific work within a much larger exhibition:

The Concerto might be a tribute to the pluralism that Roosevelt's America in its ideal form embodied. There are folk melodies of the Hungarian, Romanian, and Czech peasant traditions, Gypsy dances, North African rhythms, echoes of both the impressionism of Debussy and the expressionism of Schoenberg (they are unified in the Elegy movement), Stravinsky's Rite, and, riding high above, pealing fanfares of all-American brass. Ridicule aside, the Shostakovich quotation adds to the polyglot diversity of the piece. Almost every instrument in the orchestra has a solo role, even as the collective emotion swells. Bartók's parting gift to his adopted country—he died on September 26, 1945—is a portrait of democracy in action.

Ross also has a nice piece in this week's New Yorker about blogging and the online world of classical music. "Some recent articles have asked whether the Internet can save classical music," he writes in "The Well-Tempered Web," a piece linking to loads of interesting sites. He continues, "Classical music is, in fact, saving itself; Internet activity is merely the most immediately visible evidence of its refusal to fade away."

Remember soul singer G. M. Stevens's Sit'tin By the Window? It was released in 1968 on Mother Goose Enterprises and contained the poignant loner tracks "It's a Boy's Life (But a Man's World)" and "Everyone's Goin' Somewhere Except Me." Jack Benny wrote the liner notes, describing "G.S." (somehow his initials changed from front cover to back) as "a bright and intelligent young man with a great, exciting future." Or perhaps you recall Mingering Mike's 1972 gospel holiday album, Just in Time for Easter. Or the Outsiders' seventies release, Mercy the World, containing "The World Is Just a Big Ball of Air" and "We Mercy the World."

But you probably don't, because all these records exist in editions of one. Or less than one, if you take into account that their elaborate hand-drawn covers, often sealed in cellophane and slapped with price tags, contained no actual vinyl. They, and a hundred other imaginary albums and singles, were created on cardboard by a Maryland man who still goes only by the Mingering Mike moniker. In 2003, they were rediscovered in a Washington D.C. flea market by soul-obsessed record crate digger Dori Hadar, who manged to track down the artist. Mike informed him that his find was the sad result of Mike's inability to pay the rent on his storage space.

While Mingering Mike's fantasy recording never took off, he has since been rightfully lauded as one of the more fascinating so-called outsider artists to emerge in recent years. And though his music can't be heard, it can certainly be seen: through July 28 at the Hemphill Gallery in Washington, DC; in the handsome Princeton Architectural Press tome Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar; and on a website. Every great unknown soul singer should enjoy such an afterlife.

The demise of record-album cover art makes me sad. Even really bad cover art was better than no album-cover art at all. And it sure beats the diminished imagery and unreadable type that passes for contemporary CD design. Once upon a time, as you know, pop-art giants photographed, illustrated, clipped, and constructed album covers that resonated as strongly as the music they embellished. Artists such as Storm Thorgerson (Pink Floyd), Cal Schenkel (the Mothers of Invention), Martin Sharp (Cream), and Stanley Mouse (Grateful Dead) created classic art that in retrospect seems inseparable from the classic rock inside.

If I had to pick a favorite cover designer, though, it would probably be Jim Flora, who worked as an illustrator and creative designer at Columbia Records from 1942 to 1950. Flora was a highly talented, primarily commercial artist who once claimed that his only goal was to create "a piece of excitement." Writer-DJ Irwin Chusid, digital image restorer Barbara Economon, and Fantagraphics Books have done a terrific job of keeping Flora's "hieroglyphic" montages and Paul Klee-like creations alive in two amazing books.

While The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora collects most of Flora's album covers and kid-lit illustrations, the recently published Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora gathers together all the miscellaneous paintings, sketches, woodcuts, brochures, and other items the pair discovered when Flora's family kindly allowed them to ransack the late artist's Connecticut storage facility. As Flora artistic heir JD King says in his introduction, "The drawings and paintings are, in essence, jazz music on paper or canvas."