Search results for ""Author John Corbett""

From scouring flea markets and eBay to maxing out their credit cards, record collectors will do just about anything to score a long-sought-after album. In Vinyl Freak, music writer, curator, and collector John Corbett burrows deep inside the record fiend’s mind, documenting and reflecting on his decades-long love affair with vinyl. Discussing more than 200 rare and out-of-print LPs, Vinyl Freak is composed in part of Corbett's long-running DownBeat magazine column of the same name, which was devoted to records that had not appeared on CD. In other essays where he combines memoir and criticism, Corbett considers the current vinyl boom, explains why vinyl is his preferred medium, profiles collector subcultures, and recounts his adventures assembling the Alton Abraham Sun Ra Archive, an event so all-consuming that he claims it cured his record-collecting addiction. Perfect for vinyl newbies and veteran crate diggers alike, Vinyl Freak plumbs the motivations that drive Corbett and collectors everywhere.

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Improvisation rattles some listeners. Maybe they’re even suspicious of it. John Coltrane’s saxophonic flights of fancy, Jimi Hendrix’s feedback drenched guitar solos, Ravi Shankar’s sitar extrapolations—all these sounds seem like so much noodling or jamming, indulgent self-expression. “Just” improvising, as is sometimes said. For these music fans, it seems natural that music is meant to be composed. In the first book of its kind, John Corbett’s A Listener’s Guide to Free Improvisation provides a how-to manual for the most extreme example of spontaneous improvising: music with no pre-planned material at all. Drawing on over three decades of writing about, presenting, playing, teaching, and studying freely improvised music, Corbett offers an enriching set of tools that show any curious listener how to really listen, and he encourages them to enjoy the human impulse— found all around the world— to make up music on the spot. Corbett equips his reader for a journey into a difficult musical landscape, where there is no steady beat, no pre-ordained format, no overarching melodic or harmonic framework, and where tones can ring with the sharpest of burrs. In “Fundamentals,” he explores key areas of interest, such as how the musicians interact, the malleability of time, overcoming impatience, and watching out for changes and transitions; he grounds these observations in concrete listening exercises, a veritable training regime for musical attentiveness. Then he takes readers deeper in “Advanced Techniques,” plumbing the philosophical conundrums at the heart of free improvisation, including topics such as the influence of the audience and the counterintuitive challenge of listening while asleep. Scattered throughout are helpful and accessible lists of essential resources—recordings, books, videos— and a registry of major practicing free improvisors from Noël Akchoté to John Zorn, particularly essential because this music is best experienced live. The result is a concise, humorous, and inspiring guide, a unique book that will help transform one of the world’s most notoriously unapproachable artforms into a rewarding and enjoyable experience.

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Microgroove continues John Corbett's exploration of diverse musics, with essays, interviews, and musician profiles that focus on jazz, improvised music, contemporary classical, rock, folk, blues, post-punk, and cartoon music. Corbett's approach to writing is as polymorphous as the music, ranging from oral history and journalistic portraiture to deeply engaged cultural critique. Corbett advocates for the relevance of "little" music, which despite its smaller audience is of enormous cultural significance. He writes on musicians as varied as Sun Ra, PJ Harvey, Koko Taylor, Steve Lacy, and Helmut Lachenmann. Among other topics, he discusses recording formats; the relationship between music and visual art, dance, and poetry; and, with Terri Kapsalis, the role of female orgasm sounds in contemporary popular music. Above all, Corbett privileges the importance of improvisation; he insists on the need to pay close attention to “other” music and celebrates its ability to open up pathways to new ideas, fresh modes of expression, and unforeseen ways of knowing.

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From scouring flea markets and eBay to maxing out their credit cards, record collectors will do just about anything to score a long-sought-after album. In Vinyl Freak, music writer, curator, and collector John Corbett burrows deep inside the record fiend’s mind, documenting and reflecting on his decades-long love affair with vinyl. Discussing more than 200 rare and out-of-print LPs, Vinyl Freak is composed in part of Corbett's long-running DownBeat magazine column of the same name, which was devoted to records that had not appeared on CD. In other essays where he combines memoir and criticism, Corbett considers the current vinyl boom, explains why vinyl is his preferred medium, profiles collector subcultures, and recounts his adventures assembling the Alton Abraham Sun Ra Archive, an event so all-consuming that he claims it cured his record-collecting addiction. Perfect for vinyl newbies and veteran crate diggers alike, Vinyl Freak plumbs the motivations that drive Corbett and collectors everywhere.

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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.

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Unless you lived through the 1970s, it seems impossible to understand it at all. Drug delirium, groovy fashion, religious cults, mega corporations, glitzy glam, hard rock, global unrest—from our 2018 perspective, the seventies are often remembered as a bizarre blur of bohemianism and disco. With Pick Up the Pieces, John Corbett transports us back in time to this thrillingly tumultuous era through a playful exploration of its music. Song by song, album by album, he draws our imaginations back into one of the wildest decades in history. Rock. Disco. Pop. Soul. Jazz. Folk. Funk. The music scene of the 1970s was as varied as it was exhilarating, but the decade’s diversity of sound has never been captured in one book before now. Pick Up the Pieces gives a panoramic view of the era’s music and culture through seventy-eight essays that allow readers to dip in and out of the decade at random or immerse themselves completely in Corbett’s chronological journey. An inviting mix of skilled music criticism and cultural observation, Pick Up the Pieces is also a coming-of-age story, tracking the author’s absorption in music as he grows from age seven to seventeen. Along with entertaining personal observations and stories, Corbett includes little-known insights on musicians from Pink Floyd, Joni Mitchell, James Brown, and Fleetwood Mac to the Residents, Devo, Gal Costa, and Julius Hemphill. A master DJ on the page, Corbett takes us through the curated playlist that is Pick Up the Pieces with captivating melody of language and powerful enthusiasm for the era. This funny, energetic book will have readers longing nostalgically for a decade long past.

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Microgroove continues John Corbett's exploration of diverse musics, with essays, interviews, and musician profiles that focus on jazz, improvised music, contemporary classical, rock, folk, blues, post-punk, and cartoon music. Corbett's approach to writing is as polymorphous as the music, ranging from oral history and journalistic portraiture to deeply engaged cultural critique. Corbett advocates for the relevance of "little" music, which despite its smaller audience is of enormous cultural significance. He writes on musicians as varied as Sun Ra, PJ Harvey, Koko Taylor, Steve Lacy, and Helmut Lachenmann. Among other topics, he discusses recording formats; the relationship between music and visual art, dance, and poetry; and, with Terri Kapsalis, the role of female orgasm sounds in contemporary popular music. Above all, Corbett privileges the importance of improvisation; he insists on the need to pay close attention to “other” music and celebrates its ability to open up pathways to new ideas, fresh modes of expression, and unforeseen ways of knowing.

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People have been writing in Scots for over 700 years, but the spelling of Scots has never been fixed, with many words, like buik, buke, book, appearing in a variety of forms. Drawing on the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing, this volume provides a comprehensive survey of the spelling system of Older and Modern Scots, illustrating how this orthographic system has developed partly in response to historical shifts in pronunciation, and partly as a result of social and political change. Spelling Scots acts not only as a wide-ranging reference book to the changing orthography of Scots, but also as an outline of the active interventions in the practices that have guided Scots spelling. The book shows how canonical writers of poetry and fiction in Scots from 1700 to the present day have blended convention and innovation in presenting Scots in literary texts, and it explores the influence of key writers such as Ramsay, Fergusson, Burns, Scott, Hogg and Stevenson. Introducing an innovative method of tracing the use of key spelling variants in a corpus of Scots writing, the book discusses the implication of this method for promoting wider literacy in Scots. This volume should be a standard reference volume in libraries of institutions where literature in Scots is studied. It offers a detailed survey of why literature in Scots exhibits such a broad range of variant spellings.

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This is an essential guide to using digital resources in the study of English language and linguistics. Assuming no prior experience, it introduces the fundamentals of online corpora and equips readers with the skills needed to search and interpret corpus data. Later chapters focus on specific elements of linguistic analysis, namely vocabulary, grammar, discourse and pronunciation. Examples from five major online corpora illustrate key issues to consider in corpus analysis, while case studies and activities help students get to grips with the wide range of resources that are available and select those that best suit their needs. Perfect for students of corpus linguistics and applied linguistics, this engaging and accessible guide opens the door to an ever-expanding world of online resources. It is also ideal for anyone who is curious about how the English language works and has a desire to explore its many written and spoken forms. New to this Edition: - Fully revised and updated throughout, incorporating the latest developments in corpus linguistics - Expanded material on corpora in teaching, contextualising corpus texts and critical discourse analysis

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The paintings of Albert Oehlen live by audacious strategies, by questioning the image and the rules of abstraction, and by an openness and beauty often reached through the unlikeliest of means. In this expansive monograph, we meet the full range of Oehlen’s artistic thoughts and approaches: paintings that integrate mirrors, paintings that are executed strictly in primary colors or only in gray, heavily pixelated paintings produced with the help of one of the first personal computers. We find collaged fragments of garish poster ads on canvases that transforming screaming slogans into abstract elements, charcoal drawings the size of a wall, finger paintings, and paintings in which black treelike silhouettes contort themselves into a lexicon of abstract forms. Throughout, Oehlen transforms the conceptual into the compositional, at once invigorating and challenging the viewer. Revising and updating TASCHEN’s previous Collector’s Edition, this revelatory survey explores Oehlen’s trajectory from his early days up to the present. It features more than 400 paintings as well as insightful commentaries and interviews, covering Oehlen’s different work stages and approaches. Roberto Ohrt’s essay takes us back to the special vibe of the early 1980s where Oehlen worked alongside Kippenberger, Büttner, and others, part of a scene that painted quickly and close to the pulse of time. Oehlen discusses his computer paintings with John Corbett, and follows up on his more recent work, his thoughts on art, and his day in the studio in a lengthy conversation with Alexander Klar. Together with a collection of shorter texts and statements, this brings us close to the ideas of an artist who has been dubbed “the most resourceful abstract painter alive.”

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Brash, brilliant and funny, the Chicago Imagists—from the Hairy Who and Nonplussed Some to False Image and Marriage Chicago Style—receive a full appraisal in this electrifying volume This amply illustrated catalog surveys the work of the group of artists known as the Chicago Imagists, who exhibited together in the late 1960s, and whose influence continues to spread 50 years later. Drawing from a collection of rarely seen works, the book presents work from the 17 artists who comprise the original Imagist exhibition groups—the Hairy Who, Nonplussed Some, False Image and Marriage Chicago Style—as well as a number of independent Chicago artists. These artists and their historic work, which is brash, brilliant and often humorous, have seen increased attention over the last decade. Scholars, collectors and younger artists have been magnetized by the paintings of Jim Nutt, Christina Ramberg, Roger Brown, Gladys Nilsson and Karl Wirsum, but there are few large-scale, high-quality books documenting their work. In addition to a reprint of an important and little-known piece by Dennis Adrian, the book features original essays that provide a big-picture view of the vibrant Chicago art ecosystem and explore the relationship between Imagism and abstraction and between historical Imagist art and its offspring. Also included are an interview with the collectors, biographical “snapshots” of seven key artists and a timeline plotting major works in the collection against important historical events in the art world. With this comprehensive range of material, Private Eye: The Imagist Impulse in Chicago Art adds substantively to the topic’s scholarship.

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Online collaboration can be a powerful means of encouraging language learners to make connections between their local community and people from other cultural backgrounds. In doing so, learners develop their language skills while exploring different attitudes, values and beliefs. The authors of this book draw on 20 years of participation in numerous online intercultural exchanges to offer teachers a down-to-earth guide to finding partners, choosing a platform and designing online exchanges. They share their experience of working with learners to ensure that deep intercultural learning occurs alongside language development. This book offers strategies for mediating conflict with partners and participants, and guidance on the assessment of linguistic and intercultural competences. It is a practical resource for language teachers, informed by the latest research on language teaching and intercultural telecollaborations and situated in the reality of classrooms around the world.

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This richly illustrated volume offers an in-depth look into artist Sadie Benning’s exhibition Shared Eye, presented at the Renaissance Society and the Kunsthalle Basel. The forty mixed-media panels in Shared Eye defy easy categorization: they include collage, painting, photography, and sculpture. The seriality of the installation also nods to the artist’s history with the moving image. Throughout the 1990s, Benning created an extraordinary body of experimental video work, improvising with materials at hand and a toy camera. More than two decades later, in Shared Eye we see the handmade aesthetic, grainy imagery, and durational logic of Benning’s early videos take on different forms to correspond to our current moment. The catalog documents the exhibition in full color, and it features an interview between the artist and Julie Ault, essays by John Corbett and Christine Mehring, and an introduction by the Renaissance Society’s executive director, Solveig Øvstebø, and Elena Filipovic, director of Kunsthalle Basel. These texts provide illuminating framework for the exhibition and key insights into how Benning pushes the limits of abstraction in response to our present political climate.

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Combines historical rigour with an analysis of dramatic contexts, themes and forms The 17 contributors explore the longstanding and vibrant Scottish dramatic tradition and the important developments in Scottish dramatic writing and theatre, with particular attention to the last 100 years. The first part of the volume covers Scottish drama from the earliest records to the late twentieth-century literary revival, as well as translation in Scottish theatre and non-theatrical drama. The second part focuses on the work of influential Scottish playwrights, from J. M. Barrie and James Bridie to Ena Lamont Stewart, Liz Lochhead and Edwin Morgan and right up to contemporary playwrights Anthony Neilson, Gregory Burke, Henry Adams and Douglas Maxwell. Key Features * Provides a thorough overview of Scottish theatre from the earliest days to the present * Deals with play texts as well as with the key contexts and themes of drama and theatre over the years * Provides insights into the work of leading Scottish playwrights, including the new generations since the 1970s * Written for students and theatre-lovers alike

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