Extended Play
Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein
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- $39.99
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- $39.99
Publisher Description
In Extended Play, one of the country’s most innovative music writers conducts a wide-ranging tour through the outer limits of contemporary music. Over the course of more than twenty-five portraits, interviews, and essays, John Corbett engages artists from lands as distant as Sweden, Siberia, and Saturn. With a special emphasis on African American and European improvisers, the book explores the famous and the little known, from John Cage and George Clinton to Anthony Braxton and Sun Ra. Employing approaches as diverse as the music he celebrates, Corbett illuminates the sound and theory of funk and rap, blues and jazz, contemporary classical, free improvisation, rock, and reggae.
Using cultural critique and textual theory, Corbett addresses a broad spectrum of issues, such as the status of recorded music in postmodern culture, the politics of self-censorship, experimentation, and alternativism in the music industry, and the use of metaphors of space and madness in the work of African American musicians. He follows these more theoretically oriented essays with a series of extensive profiles and in-depth interviews that offer contrasting and complementary perspectives on some of the world’s most creative musicians and their work. Included here are more than twenty original photographs as well as a meticulously annotated discography. The result is one of the most thoughtful, and most entertaining, investigations of contemporary music available today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Corbett's musical tastes run the experimental gamut bordered by such contemporary iconoclasts as the late sound poet John Cage, Fluxus and extra-terrestrial funk ringmaster George Clinton. The late Sun Ra and such unacknowledged living geniuses of ``free'' music as Derek Bailey, Anthony Braxton and Peter Brotzmann receive their due as well. In this collection of theoretical essays, artist profiles and interviews, Corbett exhibits a thorough knowledge of experimental music and its makers but doesn't always seem to decide for whom he's writing--the musical layman, to whom many of his subjects mean nothing, or the academic musician. The theoretical essays that open the book are dense with endnotes and insider jargon. The artist profiles and interviews are characterized by a looser, friendlier variety of authority. Corbett's profile of Pinetop Perkins chronicles the piano great's career with such blues legends as Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker while his 1992 interview with John Cage is as provocative in its structure as the acclaimed composer's work. Extended Play offers rare, caring glimpses of gifted musicians few music fans know, but should. A ``Guide to Further Listening'' provides a brief discography for each of the book's subjects.
