Guitars inspire cult-like devotion: an aficionado can tell you precisely when and where their favorite instrument was made, the wood it is made from, and that wood's unique effect on the instrument's sound. In The Guitar, Chris Gibson and Andrew Warr...

The first performance of Handel's Messiah in Dublin in 1742 is now legendary. Gentlemen were asked to leave their swords at home and ladies to come without hoops in their skirts in order to fit more people into the audience. Why then, did this now fa...

The Biographics series presents an entirely new way of looking at the lives of the world's greatest thinkers and creatives. It takes the 50 defining facts, dates, thoughts, habits, and achievements of each subject, and uses infographics to convey eac...

Miles Davis's Bitches Brew is one of the most iconic albums in American music, the preeminent landmark and fertile seedbed of jazz-fusion. Fans have been fortunate in the past few years to gain access to Davis's live recordings from this time, when h...

For sale in CIS only! Shortly before his death, the Devonshire-born cleric, writer and antiquarian, Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924) wrote: "To this day I consider that the recovery of our West Country melodies has been the principal achievement of m...

In the years spanning from 1800 to 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven completed nine symphonies, now considered among the greatest masterpieces of Western music. Yet despite the fact that this time period, located in the wake of the Enlightenment and at the...

If you enjoy popular music and culture today, you have vaudeville to thank. From the 1870s until the 1920s, vaudeville was the dominant context for popular entertainment in the United States, laying the groundwork for the music industry we know today...

In the United States, African American and Italian cultures have been intertwined for more than a hundred years. From as early as nineteenth-century African American opera star Thomas Bowers – "The Colored Mario" – all the way to hip-hop entrepreneur...

In the illustrious and richly documented history of American jazz, no figure has been more controversial than the jazz critic. Jazz critics can be revered or reviled – often both – but they should not be ignored. And while the tradition of jazz has b...