Help!: The Beatles, Duke Ellington, and the Magic of Collaboration
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
The fascinating story of how creative cooperation inspired two of the world’s most celebrated musical acts.
The Beatles and Duke Ellington’s Orchestra stand as the two greatest examples of collaboration in music history. Through his highly original examination of these two musical legends, Duke University musicologist Thomas Brothers delivers a portrait of the creative process at work, demonstrating that the cooperative method at the foundation of these two artist- groups was the primary reason for their unmatched musical success.
While clarifying the historical record of who wrote what, with whom, and how, Brothers brings the past to life with a breadth of musical knowledge that reverberates through every page, and analyses of songs from Lennon and McCartney’s Strawberry Fields Forever to Billy Strayhorn’s Chelsea Bridge. Help! describes in rich detail the music and mastery of two cultural leaders whose popularity has never dimmed.
“This is musicology with taste as well as ears.” — Wall Street Journal
“Adds significantly to our knowledge of popular music and iconic musicians of the 20th century.” — Philadelphia Inquirer
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Duke University musicologist Brothers (Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism) explores the collaborative nature of two massively influential 20th-century songwriting pairs in this probing study of pop-music collaboration. The first part of the book shatters jazz bandleader Duke Ellington's image as a lone genius composer, arguing that his talents were less musical than "conceptual," and that he picked up tunes and stylings from his sidemen and in-house composer-arranger Billy Strayhorn and assembled them into groundbreaking pieces (while hogging credit and copyrights). The second part examines the Beatles' songwriters, rhythm-and-blues-influenced Paul McCartney and John Lennon, a supposedly egalitarian collaboration; in reality, Brothers notes, Lennon mainly contributed edgy lyrics and attitude while the great tunes and arrangements were disproportionately McCartney's. Brothers presents detailed reconstructions of who did what, twining the making-of narratives with evocative appreciations of the resulting works, along with an erudite, engagingly written history of 20th-century pop music. His insistence on the necessity of collaboration doesn't quite square with the stories he tells: McCartney's genius often flourished without Lennon's input, and Ellington's composing chops were outclassed by those of Strayhorn. Still, Brothers's rich analyses make for an engrossing narrative that illuminates some of pop music's greatest creative collaborations. Photos.
