Kansas Music Review
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Published: 2007
Total Pages: 242
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Tropic of Kansas
Author: Christopher Brown
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-07-11
Total Pages: 450
ISBN-13: 0062563823
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“Timely, dark, and ultimately hopeful: it might not ‘make America great again,’ but then again, it just might.”—Cory Doctorow, New York Times bestselling and award winning author of Homeland Acclaimed short story writer and editor of the World Fantasy Award-nominee Three Messages and a Warning eerily envisions an American society unraveling and our borders closed off—from the other side—in this haunting and provocative novel that combines Max Barry’s Jennifer Government, Philip K. Dick’s classic Man in the High Castle, and China Mieville’s The City & the City The United States of America is no more. Broken into warring territories, its center has become a wasteland DMZ known as “the Tropic of Kansas.” Though this gaping geographic hole has no clear boundaries, everyone knows it's out there—that once-bountiful part of the heartland, broken by greed and exploitation, where neglect now breeds unrest. Two travelers appear in this arid American wilderness: Sig, the fugitive orphan of political dissidents, and his foster sister Tania, a government investigator whose search for Sig leads her into her own past—and towards an unexpected future. Sig promised those he loves that he would make it to the revolutionary redoubt of occupied New Orleans. But first he must survive the wild edgelands of a barren mid-America policed by citizen militias and autonomous drones, where one wrong move can mean capture . . . or death. One step behind, undercover in the underground, is Tania. Her infiltration of clandestine networks made of old technology and new politics soon transforms her into the hunted one, and gives her a shot at being the agent of real change—if she is willing to give up the explosive government secrets she has sworn to protect. As brother and sister traverse these vast and dangerous badlands, their paths will eventually intersect on the front lines of a revolution whose fuse they are about to light. “Futurist as provocateur! The world is sheer batshit genius . . . a truly hallucinatorily envisioned environment.”—William Gibson, New York Times bestselling and award-winning author
Goin' to Kansas City
Author: Nathan W. Pearson
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 1987
Total Pages: 322
ISBN-13: 9780252064388
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"A big juicy wedge of jazz history. . . . Lots of wonderful stories." -- Los Angeles Daily News "Kansas City was a hub for Jazz bands that crisscrossed the country in the 1930s. . . . The interviews go beyond jazz into the infamous political machinery that made Kansas City a wide-open and corrupt town where jazz could flourish." -- Choice "A wealth of stories, a good measure of entertainment and a valuable stab at history -- not to mention some great pictures." -- The Kansas City Star
Facing the Music
Author: Jennifer Knapp
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2014-10-07
Total Pages: 276
ISBN-13: 1476759499
DOWNLOAD EBOOKJennifer Knapp’s meteoric rise in the Christian music industry ended abruptly when she walked away and came out publicly as a lesbian. This is her story—of coming to Christ, of building a career, of admitting who she is, and of how her faith remained strong through it all. At the top of her career in the Christian music industry, Jennifer Knapp quit. A few years later, she publicly revealed she is gay. A media frenzy ensued, and many of her former fans were angry with what they saw as turning her back on God. But through it all, she held on to the truth that had guided her from the beginning. In this memoir, she finally tells her story: of her troubled childhood, the love of music that pulled her through, her dramatic conversion to Christianity, her rise to stardom, her abrupt departure from Christian Contemporary Music, her years of trying to come to terms with her sexual orientation, and her return to music and Nashville in 2010, when she came out publicly for the first time. She also talks about the importance of her faith, and despite the many who claim she can no longer call herself a believer, she maintains that she is both gay and a Christian. Now an advocate for LGBT issues in the church, Jennifer has witnessed heartbreaking struggles as churches wrestle with issues of homosexuality and faith. This engrossing, inspiring memoir will help people understand her story and to believe in their own stories, whatever they may be.
Kansas City Lightning
Author: Stanley Crouch
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2013-09-24
Total Pages: 285
ISBN-13: 0062314068
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“A tour de force. . . . Crouch has given us a bone-deep understanding of Parker’s music and the world that produced it. In his pages, Bird still lives.” — Washington Post A stunning portrait of Charlie Parker, one of the most talented and influential musicians of the twentieth century, from Stanley Crouch, one of the foremost authorities on jazz and culture in America. Throughout his life, Charlie Parker personified the tortured American artist: a revolutionary performer who used his alto saxophone to create a new music known as bebop even as he wrestled with a drug addiction that would lead to his death at the age of thirty-four. Drawing on interviews with peers, collaborators, and family members, Stanley Crouch recreates Parker’s Depression-era childhood; his early days navigating the Kansas City nightlife, inspired by lions like Lester Young and Count Basie; and on to New York, where he began to transcend the music he had mastered. Crouch reveals an ambitious young man torn between music and drugs, between his domineering mother and his impressionable young wife, whose teenage romance with Charlie lies at the bittersweet heart of this story. With the wisdom of a jazz scholar, the cultural insights of an acclaimed social critic, and the narrative skill of a literary novelist, Stanley Crouch illuminates this American master as never before.
Your Band Sucks
Author: Jon Fine
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2015
Total Pages: 322
ISBN-13: 067002659X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Jon Fine spent nearly thirty years performing and recording with bands that played various forms of aggressive and challenging underground rock music, and, as he writes in this memoir, at no point were any of those bands 'ever threatened, even distantly, by actual fame.' Yet when members of his first band, Bitch Magnet, reunited after twenty-one years to tour ... diehard longtime fans traveled from far and wide to attend those shows, despite creeping middle-age obligations of parenthood and 9-to-5 jobs, testament to the remarkable staying power of the indie culture that the bands predating the likes of Bitch Magnet--among them Black Flag, Mission of Burma, and Sonic Youth --willed into existence through sheer determination and a shared disdain for the mediocrity of contemporary popular music"--Amazon.com.
Beneath Missouri Skies
Author: Carolyn Glenn Brewer
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
Published: 2021-05-15
Total Pages: 305
ISBN-13: 1574418319
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe New Yorker recently referred to Pat Metheny as “possibly the most influential jazz guitarist of the past five decades.” A native of Lee’s Summit, Missouri, just southeast of Kansas City, Metheny started playing in pizza parlors at age fourteen. By the time he graduated from high school he was the first-call guitarist for Kansas City jazz clubs, private clubs, and jazz festivals. Now 66, he attributes his early success to the local musical environment he was brought up in and the players and teachers who nurtured his talent and welcomed him into the jazz community. Metheny's twenty Grammys in ten categories speak to his versatility and popularity. Despite five decades of interviews, none have conveyed in detail his stories about his teenage years. Beneath Missouri Skies also reveals important details about jazz in Kansas City during the sixties and early seventies, often overlooked in histories of Kansas City jazz. Yet this time of cultural change was characterized by an outstanding level of musicianship. Author Carolyn Glenn Brewer shows how his keen sense of ensemble had its genesis in his school band under the guidance of a beloved band director. Drawn from news accounts, archival material, interviews, and remembrances, to which the author had unique access, Beneath Missouri Skies portrays a place and time from which Metheny still draws inspiration and strength.
Kansas in August
Author: Patrick Gale
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-08-30
Total Pages: 125
ISBN-13: 1504038606
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA riotous dark comedy set in the backstreets of London about an unconventional love triangle, a lonely teacher, and a lost baby. Hilary Metcalfe is an English teacher who loathes his work so thoroughly that he requires a half bottle of scotch in order to grade a stack of homework. His only joys are private ones: American musicals, from South Pacific to The King and I, and his absolutely gorgeous lover, Rufus, whom he has utterly failed to domesticate. Once, he had dreams of being an actor, a star of London’s West End. Now he would settle for the knowledge that Rufus is his and his alone. He’ll get neither—but he may get something much better instead. When Rufus stands him up on his birthday, Hilary discovers something astonishing in the subway station: a frightened, abandoned baby boy. Drunk and lonely, Hilary brings the baby home to his seedy Shepherd’s Bush flat, and soon finds he cannot live without the child. As Rufus falls into a romantic encounter with, of all people, Hilary’s sister, the three are caught in a bizarre love triangle—with a baby in the middle. A spiritual sequel to Patrick Gale’s second London novel, Ease, this is a charming portrait of the British capital at its most cosmopolitan. For anyone who has ever wished for a life different from his own, Kansas in August is a captivating tale.
Kansas
Author: Kevin Cummings
Publisher: On Track
Published: 2020-06-30
Total Pages: 160
ISBN-13: 9781789520576
DOWNLOAD EBOOKProgressive rock is generally considered an English affair, focusing on the likes of Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, King Crimson. However, in America, the best-known exponents of progressive rock are Kansas. Though the band is known mainly for their radio staples 'Carry On Wayward Son' and 'Dust in the Wind, ' the band's musical range runs much deeper. A unique blend of European prog rock and American blues, Kansas are capable of an extended symphonic epic followed by a shorter, gritty blues song. Yet even those songs are never simple three-chord tunes. Virtually everything the band recorded has a progressive touch. Such is the beauty of Kansas' music. Despite personnel changes, including the departure of three lead singers, they continue to flourish. Recent years have brought a new line up, a new album, and a rejuvenated outlook, resulting in acclaimed live shows. Their legacy will no doubt continue as they approach their half-century mark. Kansas: On Track follows the band from their first album to their most recent. Each song is carefully considered in context, along with comments from the author and key figures in the band's history. Hardcore fans and casual listeners alike will gain a renewed appreciation of America's premier progressive rock band
