Title search results
Showing 1 - 20 of 7301 items
Shake It Up, Baby!: The Rise of Beatlemania and the Mayhem of 1963
By Ken McNab. 2024
A vivid, captivating account of the Beatles&’s musical transformation throughout the pivotal year of 1963, as the world became caught…
up in the maelstrom of Beatlemania and its far-reaching cultural impact. The Beatles broke up more than half a century ago, yet millions around the globe are still drawn to the legacy of four lads from Liverpool. From the carefree innocence of "A Hard Day's Night" to the experimental psychedelia of "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,&” their message of love, peace, and hope still resonates. In Shake It Up, Baby! we go back to the start—to 1963, when they went from playing in small clubs in the remote Scottish Highlands to four number one singles, two number one albums, three national tours, and being besieged by thousands of fans at gigs all over Britain. Ken McNab tells the story through gripping, exclusive eye-witness accounts from those who were there: the Beatlemaniacs, the journalists, broadcasters, and television producers who were scrambling to make sense of it all—and the other bands who could only watch in awe as the Beatles went from bottom of the bill to headline act to the biggest band on the planet, forever transforming musical history.A Black Girl in the Middle: Essays on (Allegedly) Figuring It All Out
By Shenequa Golding. 2024
A blazingly honest essay collection from a refreshing new voice exploring the in-between moments for Black women and girls, and…
what it means to simply exist&“At thirty-seven years old I can say Shenequa is a big name and I&’m a big, bold woman.&”Shenequa Golding doesn&’t aim to speak for all Black women. We&’re too vast, too vibrant, and too complicated. As an adult, Golding begins to own her boldness, but growing up, she found herself &“kind of in the middle,&” fluctuating between not being the fly kid or the overachiever. Her debut collection of essays, A Black Girl in the Middle taps into life&’s wins and losses, representing the middle ground for Black girls and women.Golding packs humor, curiosity, honesty, anger, and ultimately acceptance in 12 essays spanning her life in Queens, NY, as a first generation Jamaican American. She breaks down the 10 levels of Black Girl Math, from the hard glare to responses reserved for unfaithful boyfriends. She comes to terms with and heals from fraught relationships with her father, friends, and romantic partners. She takes the devastating news that she&’s a Black girl with a &“flat ass&” in stride, and adds squats to her routine, eventually. From a harrowing encounter in a hotel room leading her to explore celibacy (for now) to embracing rather than fearing the &“Milli Vanilli&” of emotions in hurt and anger, Golding embraces everything she&’s learned with wit, heart, and humility. A Black Girl in the Middle is both an acknowledgment of the complexity and pride of not always fitting in and validation of what Black girlhood and womanhood can be.Got a Revolution!: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane
By Jeff Tamarkin. 2003
The most successful and influential rock band to emerge from San Francisco during the 1960s, Jefferson Airplane created the sound…
of a generation. Their smash hits "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit" virtually invented the era's signature pulsating psychedelic music and, during one of the most tumultuous times in American history, came to personify the decade's radical counterculture. In this groundbreaking biography of the band, veteran music writer and historian Jeff Tamarkin produces a portrait of the band like none that has come before it. Having worked closely with Jefferson Airplane for more than a decade, Tamarkin had unprecedented access to the band members, their families, friends, lovers, crew members, fellow musicians, cultural luminaries, even the highest-ranking politicians of the time. More than just a definitive history, Got a Revolution! is a rock legend unto itself. Jann Wenner, editor-in-chief and publisher of Rolling Stone, wrote, "The classic [Jefferson] Airplane lineup were both architects and messengers of a psychedelic age, a liberation of mind and body that profoundly changed American art, politics, and spirituality. It was a renaissance that could only have been born in San Francisco, and the Airplane, more than any other band in town, spread the good news nationwide."My Mama, Cass: A Memoir
By Owen Elliot-Kugell. 2024
A long-awaited, myth-busting, and deeply affecting memoir by the daughter of legendary rock star &“Mama&” Cass Elliot To the rest…
of the world, Cass Elliot was a rock star; A charismatic, wisecracking singer from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducted band, The Mamas & The Papas; A legend of Laurel Canyon, decked out in her custom-made Muumuus, glittering designer jewelry, blessed with a powerful, instantly identifiable singing voice which helped define the sound of the 1960s counterculture movement. But to Owen Elliot-Kugell, she was just Mom. In the nearly 50 years since Cass Elliot&’s untimely death at the age of 32, rumors and myths have swirled about, shading nearly every aspect of her life. In her long-awaited memoir, Owen Elliot-Kugell shares the groundbreaking story of her mom as only a daughter can tell it. In My Mama, Cass, Owen pulls back the curtains of her mother&’s life from the sold-out theaters to behind the closed doors of her infamous California abode. Born Ellen Naomi Cohen, the woman who was known to the world as Cass Elliot was decades ahead of her time: an independently minded, outspoken woman who broke through a male-dominated business, a forward-thinking feminist, and a single parent who embraced motherhood from the moment Owen entered the world. From the closely guarded secret of Owen&’s paternity to Cass&’s lifelong struggles with self-esteem and weight, to rumors surrounding her mother&’s death, Owen illuminates the complex truths of her mother&’s life, sharing interviews with the high-profile figures who orbited Cass, as well as never-before-heard tales of her mother and this legendary period of American history. Featuring intimate family and archival photos as well as interviews and memories from famous friends, fans, and colleagues who loved and respected Cass, this book is both a love story and a mystery, a tale of self-discovery and a daughter&’s devotion. At its core, My Mama, Cass is a beautifully crafted testament befitting of Cass Elliot&’s enduring cultural impact and legacy, written by the person who knew and loved her best.A Light in the Darkness: The Music and Life of Joaquín Rodrigo
By Javier Suárez-Pajares, Walter Aaron Clark. 2024
A composer of singular vision. Joaquín Rodrigo (1901–1999) is best known as the composer of one of the most popular…
works of music in the twentieth century—the Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra. It’s been featured in movies and television commercials and remains a staple of concert programs for orchestras around the world. Miles Davis said, “After listening to it for a couple of weeks…I couldn’t get it out of my mind,” and he used it as inspiration for his album Sketches of Spain. But as Javier Suárez-Pajares and Walter Aaron Clark reveal in this musical biography—the first complete study in English—Rodrigo’s work and influence extend far beyond that singular composition. A Light in the Darkness takes us through Rodrigo’s childhood in Valencia, the onset of blindness at the age of three, and the beginnings of his musical education. He achieved some early success in Spain as a composer before moving to Paris in 1927 to advance his studies, following in the footsteps of other eminent Spanish composers like Isaac Albéniz, Joaquín Turina, and Manuel de Falla. There he enrolled in courses with composer Paul Dukas, met the woman who would become his wife, and earned the respect and friendship of Falla, who became his champion. Along the way, Rodrigo’s musical voice developed and matured as his horizons widened. Suárez-Pajares and Clark present a definitive account of the making of Rodrigo’s celebrated guitar concerto, even as they capture the breadth of Rodrigo’s compositional output, from solo works for piano and guitar through chamber music and vocal works to concertos and orchestral pieces. As they demonstrate, Rodrigo’s music is unmistakably Spanish, but with his own unique accent. Rodrigo’s life and career spanned a period of great tumult in Spain, and he had to navigate strong, shifting political and cultural currents—before, during, and after Franco. An authoritative life of one of the twentieth century’s great musical geniuses, A Light in the Darkness becomes a stunning tale of how art gets made under even the most challenging circumstances.A Black Girl in the Middle: Essays on (Allegedly) Figuring It All Out
By Shenequa Golding. 2024
'Growing up in Queens, I didn't know being named Shenequa was considered "ghetto" or uncouth. It was only later in…
life that I realized I was being judged by a decision I had no control over... I will examine the double-standard Black girls with big names like Shenequa face, and the quick math we have to calculate when trying to de-escalate drama.'In A BLACK GIRL IN THE MIDDLE, a timely, compelling, and blazingly honest essay collection, Shenequa Golding holds up her magnifying glass to both her own experiences and those of young Black women everywhere. With her trademark wit and originality, Shenequa covers identity-searching themes of white supremacy, feminism, misogyny, love, sex and heartbreak. But this isn't just a book about Black women's trauma, it is also a book that embraces and celebrates the things that make Black women different. For readers of SLAY IN YOUR LANE, Candice Brathwaite and Issa Rae.A Black Girl in the Middle: Essays on (Allegedly) Figuring It All Out
By Shenequa Golding. 2024
'Growing up in Queens, I didn't know being named Shenequa was considered "ghetto" or uncouth. It was only later in…
life that I realized I was being judged by a decision I had no control over... I will examine the double-standard Black girls with big names like Shenequa face, and the quick math we have to calculate when trying to de-escalate drama.'In A BLACK GIRL IN THE MIDDLE, a timely, compelling, and blazingly honest essay collection, Shenequa Golding holds up her magnifying glass to both her own experiences and those of young Black women everywhere. With her trademark wit and originality, Shenequa covers identity-searching themes of white supremacy, feminism, misogyny, love, sex and heartbreak. But this isn't just a book about Black women's trauma, it is also a book that embraces and celebrates the things that make Black women different. For readers of SLAY IN YOUR LANE, Candice Brathwaite and Issa Rae.A Summer with Pascal
By Antoine Compagnon. 2024
From an eminent scholar, a spirited introduction to one of the great polymaths in the history of Europe.Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)…
is best known in the English-speaking world for his contributions to mathematics and physics, with both a triangle and a law in fluid mechanics named after him. Meanwhile, the classic film My Night at Maud’s popularized Pascal’s wager, an invitation to faith that has inspired generations of theologians. Despite the immensity of his reputation, few read him outside French schools. In A Summer with Pascal, celebrated literary critic Antoine Compagnon opens our minds to a figure somehow both towering and ignored.Compagnon provides a bird’s-eye view of Pascal’s life and significance, making this volume an ideal introduction. Still, scholars and neophytes alike will profit greatly from his masterful readings of the Pensées—a cornerstone of Western philosophy—and the Provincial Letters, in which Pascal advanced wry theological critiques of his contemporaries. The concise, taut chapters build upon one another, easing into writings often thought to be forbidding and dour. With Compagnon as our guide, these works are not just accessible but enchanting.A Summer with Pascal brings the early modern thinker to life in the present. In an age of profound existential doubt and assaults on truth and reason, in which religion and science are so often crudely opposed, Pascal’s sophisticated commitment to both challenges us to meet the world with true intellectual vigor.Bitter crop: The heartache and triumph of billie holiday's last year
By Paul Alexander. 2024
A revelatory look at the tumultuous life of a jazz legend and American cultural icon In the first biography of…
Billie Holiday in more than two decades, Paul Alexander—author of heralded lives of Sylvia Plath and J. D. Salinger—gives us an unconventional portrait of arguably America&’s most eminent jazz singer. He shrewdly focuses on the last year of her life—with relevant flashbacks to provide context—to evoke and examine the persistent magnificence of Holiday&’s artistry when it was supposed to have declined, in the wake of her drug abuse, relationships with violent men, and run-ins with the law. During her lifetime and after her death, Billie Holiday was often depicted as a down-on-her-luck junkie severely lacking in self-esteem. Relying on interviews with people who knew her, and new material unearthed in private collections and institutional archives, Bitter Crop —a reference to the last two words of Strange Fruit , her moving song about lynching—limns Holiday as a powerful, ambitious woman who overcame her flaws to triumph as a vital figure of American popular musicWhy we read: On bookworms, libraries, and just one more page before lights out
By Shannon Reed. 2024
A hilarious and incisive exploration of the joys of reading from a teacher, bibliophile, and Thurber Prize Semifinalist We read…
to escape, to learn, to find love, to feel seen. We read to encounter new worlds, to discover new recipes, to find connection across difference, or simply to pass a rainy afternoon. No matter the reason, books have the power to keep us safe, to challenge us, and perhaps most importantly, to make us more fully human. Shannon Reed, a longtime teacher, lifelong reader, and New Yorker contributor, gets it. With one simple goal in mind, she makes the case that we should read for pleasure above all else. In this whip-smart, laugh-out-loud-funny collection, Reed shares surprising stories from her life as a reader and the poignant ways in which books have impacted her students. From the varied novels she cherishes (Gone Girl, Their Eyes Were Watching God) to the ones she didn't (Tess of the d'Urbervilles), Reed takes us on a rollicking tour through the comforting world of literature, celebrating the books we love, the readers who love them, and the ways in which literature can transform us for the betterBehind Sad Eyes: The Life of George Harrison
By Marc Shapiro. 2002
Shrouded in a sea of mystery, the elusive George Harrison has long been the most private and enigmatic member of…
the Beatles. From his hard knock childhood in Liverpool to his ascendance into rock infamy, George Harrison's life has been a torpid ride filled with legendary success and heart crushing defeat. New York Times bestselling author Marc Shapiro sheds new light on this paradoxical rocker, whose reputation for unusual religious practices and drug abuse often rivaled his musical notoriety. A man whose desire was to be free rather than be famous, Harrison's battle against conformity lead him to music making, a soulful and creative expression that would be his ticket to success and the bane of his existence. Behind Sad Eyes is the compelling account of a man who gave the Beatles their lyrical playing style and brought solace to a generation during turbulent times.The Beatles from A to Zed: An Alphabetical Mystery Tour
By Peter Asher. 2019
A legendary record producer and performer takes readers on an alphabetical journey of insights into the music of the Beatles…
and individual reminiscences of John, Paul, George, and Ringo.Peter Asher met the Beatles in the spring of 1963, the start of a lifelong association with the band and its members. He had a front-row seat as they elevated pop music into an art form, and he was present at the creation of some of the most iconic music of our times.Asher is also a talented musician in his own right, with a great ear for what was new and fresh. Once, when Paul McCartney wrote a song that John Lennon didn’t think was right for the Beatles, Asher asked if he could record it. “A World Without Love” became a global No. 1 hit for his duo, Peter & Gordon. A few years later Asher was asked by Paul McCartney to help start Apple Records; the first artist Asher discovered and signed up was a young American singer-songwriter named James Taylor. Before long he would be not only managing and producing Taylor but also (having left Apple and moved to Los Angeles) working with Linda Ronstadt, Neil Diamond, Robin Williams, Joni Mitchell, and Cher, among others. The Beatles from A to Zed grows out of his popular radio program “From Me to You” on SiriusXM's The Beatles Channel, where he shares memories and insights about the Fab Four and their music. Here he weaves his reflections into a whimsical alphabetical journey that focuses not only on songs whose titles start with each letter, but also on recurrent themes in the Beatles’ music, the instruments they played, the innovations they pioneered, the artists who influenced them, the key people in their lives, and the cultural events of the time.Few can match Peter Asher for his fresh and personal perspective on the Beatles. And no one is a more congenial and entertaining guide to their music.My 1980s & Other Essays
By Wayne Koestenbaum. 2013
Wayne Koestenbaum returns with a zesty and hyper-literate collection of personal and critical essays on the 1980s, including essays on…
major cultural figures such as Andy Warhol and Brigitte Bardot.Wayne Koestenbaum has been described as "an impossible lovechild from a late-night, drunken three-way between Joan Didion, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag" (Bidoun). In My 1980s and Other Essays, a collection of extravagant range and style, he rises to the challenge of that improbable description.My 1980s and Other Essays opens with a series of manifestos—or, perhaps more appropriately, a series of impassioned disclosures, intellectual and personal. It then proceeds to wrestle with a series of major cultural figures, the author's own lodestars and lodestones: literary (John Ashbery, Roberto Bolaño, James Schuyler), artistic (Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol), and simply iconic (Brigitte Bardot, Cary Grant, Lana Turner). And then there is the personal—the voice, the style, the flair—that is unquestionably Koestenbaum. It amounts to a kind of intellectual autobiography that culminates in a string of passionate calls to creativity; arguments in favor of detail and nuance, and attention; a defense of pleasure, hunger, and desire in culture and experience.Koestenbaum is perched on the cusp of being a true public intellectual—his venues are more mainstream than academic, his style is eye-catching, his prose unfailingly witty and passionate, his interests profoundly wide-ranging and popular. My 1980s should be the book that pushes Koestenbaum off that cusp and truly into the public eye.Metallica: This Monster Lives
By Joe Berlinger, Greg Milner. 2004
Metallica is one of the most successful hard-rock bands of all time, having sold more than ninety million albums worldwide.…
Receiving unique, unfettered access, acclaimed filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky followed Metallica over two and a half years as they faced monumental personal and professional challenges that threatened to destroy the bands just as they returned to the studio to record their first album in four years. While the documentary itself provides an insider's view of Metallica, the two and a half years of production (and more than 1,600 hours of footage) garnered far more than can be expressed in a two-hour film.Berlinger's book about the experience reveals the stories behind the film, capturing the energy, uncertainty, and ultimate triumph of both the filming and Metallica's bid for survival. It weaves the on-screen stories together with what happened off-screen, offering intimate details of the band's struggle amidst personnel changes, addiction, and controversy. In part because Berlinger was one of the only witnesses to the intensive group-therapy sessions and numerous band meetings, his account of his experience filming the band is the most honest and deeply probing book about Metallica - or any rock band - ever written.This is the book both Metallica and film fans have dreamed of - a stark and honest look at one of rock's most important bands through the eyes of the most provocative documentary filmmakers working today.The Essays of Leonard Michaels
By Leonard Michaels. 2009
NONFICTION FROM "ONE OF THE STRONGEST AND MOST ARRESTING PROSE TALENTS OF HIS GENERATION" (LARRY MCMURTRY) Leonard Michaels was a…
writer of unfailing emotional honesty. His memoirs, originally scattered through his story collections, are among the most thrilling evocations of growing up in the New York of the 1950s and '60s—and of continuing to grow up, in the cultural turmoil of the '70s and '80s, as a writer, teacher, lover, and reader. The same honesty and excitement shine in Michaels's highly personal commentaries on culture and art. Whether he's asking what makes a story, reviewing the history of the word "relationship," or reflecting on sex in the movies, he is funny, penetrating, surprising, always alive on the page. The Essays of Leonard Michaels is the definitive collection of his nonfiction and shows, yet again, why Michaels was singled out for praise by fellow writers as diverse as Susan Sontag, Larry McMurtry, William Styron, and Charles Baxter. Beyond autobiography or criticism, it is the record of a sensibility and of a style that is unmatched in American letters.The Wound and the Bow contains seven essays by "The greatest literary critic of the twentieth century.” -New York magazine.Combining…
biographical and critical sketches, Edmund Wilson writes brilliantly on a wide-range of authors including Dickens, Kipling, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, Joyce, Jacques Casanova, and Sophocles. "In the best tradition of literary criticism… combines exact information with shrewd and searching penetration into the personal life of the artist."-The New York TimesAll One Universe: A Collection Of Fiction And Nonfiction
By Poul Anderson. 1988
Poul Anderson himself has put together a retrospective collection of his recent writings, fiction and nonfiction, under the title All…
One Universe. This is the first major Poul Anderson collection in a decade. It encompasses all his strengths as a teller of tales and, in addition, provides a running commentary in the story notes and in the essays on other literary figures such as Rudyard Kipling, Johannes B. Jensen, and John W. Campbell, Jr., commentary that illuminates the fiction, gives personal insight into the mind of this fine writer, and provides a unifying personality for All One Universe. All One Universe, then, represents the new best of Poul Anderson. It is a rich, varied selection of quintessential science fiction as well as four essays, mostly from recent years, by one of the great science fiction writers of the century. His stories are filled with roaring energy, the soul of poetry, and dark imaginings. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.The Jesus and Mary Chain: Barbed Wire Kisses
By Zoë Howe. 2014
Musically, culturally and even in terms of sheer attitude, the Jesus and Mary Chain stand alone. Their seminal debut album…
Psychocandy changed the course of popular music, and their iconic blend of psychotic white noise and darkly surreal lyrics that presaged the shoegaze movement continues to enchant and confound.Zoë Howe's biography is the fierce, frank and funny tale of the Jesus and Mary Chain, told by the band members and their associates for the very first time. The story begins in the faceless town of East Kilbride, near Glasgow, at the dawn of the 1980s with two intense, chronically shy brothers, Jim and William Reid, listening to music in their shared bedroom. What follows charts an unforgettable journey complete with incendiary live performances, their pivotal relationship with Alan McGee's Creation Records and those famous fraternal tensions—with plenty of feedback, fighting, and crafting perfect pop music along the way. It is high time this vastly influential group and sometime public enemy had their say.Skylark: The Life and Times of Johnny Mercer
By Philip Furia. 2003
Skylark is the story of the tormented but glorious life and career of Johnny Mercer, and the first biography of…
this enormously popular and influential lyricist. Raised in Savannah, Mercer brought a quintessentially southern style to both his life in New York and to his lyrics, which often evoked the landscapes and mood of his youth ("Moon River", "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening"). Mercer also absorbed the music of southern blacks--the lullabies his nurse sang to him as a baby and the spirituals that poured out of Savannah's churches-and that cool smooth lyrical style informed some of his greatest songs, such as "That Old Black Magic".Part of a golden guild whose members included Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, Mercer took Hollywood by storm in the midst of the Great Depression. Putting words to some of the most famous tunes of the time, he wrote one hit after another, from "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby" to "Jeepers Creepers" and "Hooray for Hollywood." But it was also in Hollywood that Mercer's dark underside emerged. Sober, he was a kind, generous and at times even noble southern gentleman; when he drank, Mercer tore into friends and strangers alike with vicious abuse. Mercer's wife Ginger, whom he'd bested Bing Crosby to win, suffered the cruelest attacks; Mercer would even improvise cutting lyrics about her at parties.During World War II, Mercer served as Americas's troubadour, turning out such uplifting songs as "My Shining Hour" and "Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive." He also helped create Capitol Records, the first major West Coast recording company, where he discovered many talented singers, including Peggy Lee and Nat King Cole. During this period, he also began an intense affair with Judy Garland, which rekindled time and again for the rest of their lives. Although they never found happiness together, Garland became Mercer's muse and inspired some of his most sensuous and heartbreaking lyrics: "Blues in the Night," "One for My Baby," and "Come Rain or Come Shine."Mercer amassed a catalog of over a thousand songs and during some years had a song in the Top Ten every week of the year--the songwriting equivalent of Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak--but was plagued by a sense of failure and bitterness over the big Broadway hit that seemed forever out of reach.Based on scores of interviews with friends, family and colleagues, and drawing extensively on Johnny Mercer's letters, papers and his unpublished autobiography, Skylark is an important book about one of the great and dramatic characters in 20th century popular music.Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song
By Judith Tick. 2024
An NPR 2023 "Books We Love" Pick • A Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2023 A landmark biography that reclaims…
Ella Fitzgerald as a major American artist and modernist innovator. Ella Fitzgerald (1917–1996) possessed one of the twentieth century’s most astonishing voices. In this first major biography since Fitzgerald’s death, historian Judith Tick offers a sublime portrait of this ambitious risk-taker whose exceptional musical spontaneity made her a transformational artist. Becoming Ella Fitzgerald clears up long-enduring mysteries. Archival research and in-depth family interviews shed new light on the singer’s difficult childhood in Yonkers, New York, the tragic death of her mother, and the year she spent in a girls’ reformatory school—where she sang in its renowned choir and dreamed of being a dancer. Rarely seen profiles from the Black press offer precious glimpses of Fitzgerald’s tense experiences of racial discrimination and her struggles with constricting models of Black and white femininity at midcentury. Tick’s compelling narrative depicts Fitzgerald’s complicated career in fresh and original detail, upending the traditional view that segregates vocal jazz from the genre’s mainstream. As she navigated the shifting tides between jazz and pop, she used her originality to pioneer modernist vocal jazz. Interpreting long-lost setlists, reviews from both white and Black newspapers, and newly released footage and recordings, the book explores how Ella’s transcendence as an improvisor produced onstage performances every bit as significant as her historic recorded oeuvre. From the singer’s first performance at the Apollo Theatre’s famous “Amateur Night” to the Savoy Ballroom, where Fitzgerald broke through with Chick Webb’s big band in the 1930s, Tick evokes the jazz world in riveting detail. She describes how Ella helped shape the bebop movement in the 1940s, as she joined Dizzy Gillespie and her then-husband, Ray Brown, in the world-touring Jazz at the Philharmonic, one of the first moments of high-culture acceptance for the disreputable art form. Breaking ground as a female bandleader, Fitzgerald refuted expectations of musical Blackness, deftly balancing artistic ambition and market expectations. Her legendary exploration of the Great American Songbook in the 1950s fused a Black vocal aesthetic and jazz improvisation to revolutionize the popular repertoire. This hybridity often confounded critics, yet throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Ella reached audiences around the world, electrifying concert halls, and sold millions of records. A masterful biography, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald describes a powerful woman who set a standard for American excellence nearly unmatched in the twentieth century.