Top 10 New Audiobooks! [August 2018]

[easyazon_link identifier=”B07FSSBLFY” locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century[/easyazon_link] 

Nate Chinen

Read By: Ron Butler

One of jazz’s leading critics gives us an invigorating, richly detailed portrait of the artists and events that have shaped the music of our time. Grounded in authority and brimming with style, Playing Changes is the first book to take the measure of this exhilarating moment: It is a compelling argument for the resiliency of the art form and a rejoinder to any claims about its calcification or demise.

“Playing changes”, in jazz parlance, has long referred to an improviser’s resourceful path through a chord progression. Playing Changes boldly expands on the idea, highlighting a host of significant changes – ideological, technological, theoretical, and practical – that jazz musicians have learned to navigate since the turn of the century. Nate Chinen, who has chronicled this evolution firsthand throughout his journalistic career, vividly sets the backdrop, charting the origins of jazz historicism and the rise of an institutional framework for the music.

He traces the influence of commercialized jazz education and reflects on the implications of a globalized jazz ecology. He unpacks the synergies between jazz and postmillennial hip-hop and R&B, illuminating an emergent rhythm signature for the music. And he shows how a new generation of shape-shifting elders, including Wayne Shorter and Henry Threadgill, have moved the aesthetic center of the music.

Woven throughout the book is a vibrant cast of characters – from the saxophonists Steve Coleman and Kamasi Washington to the pianists Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer to the bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding – who have exerted an important influence on the scene. This is an adaptive new music for a complex new reality, and Playing Changes is the definitive guide.

[ [easyazon_link identifier=”B07FSSBLFY” locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]Buy Now[/easyazon_link] ]

[easyazon_link identifier=”B07FQTVPP3″ locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization[/easyazon_link]

Vince Beiser

Read By: Will Damron

The gripping story of the most important overlooked commodity in the world – sand – and the crucial role it plays in our lives.

After water and air, sand is the natural resource that we consume more than any other – even more than oil. Every concrete building and paved road on Earth, every computer screen and silicon chip, is made from sand. From Egypt’s pyramids to the Hubble telescope, from the world’s tallest skyscraper to the sidewalk below it, from Chartres’ stained-glass windows to your iPhone, sand shelters us, empowers us, engages us, and inspires us. It’s the ingredient that makes possible our cities, our science, our lives – and our future.

And, incredibly, we’re running out of it.

The World in a Grain is the compelling true story of the hugely important and diminishing natural resource that grows more essential every day, and of the people who mine it, sell it, build with it – and sometimes, even kill for it. It’s also a provocative examination of the serious human and environmental costs incurred by our dependence on sand, which has received little public attention. Not all sand is created equal: Some of the easiest sand to get to is the least useful.

Award-winning journalist Vince Beiser delves deep into this world, taking listeners on a journey across the globe, from the United States to remote corners of India, China, and Dubai to explain why sand is so crucial to modern life. Along the way, listeners encounter world-changing innovators, island-building entrepreneurs, desert fighters, and murderous sand pirates. The result is an entertaining and eye-opening work, one that is both unexpected and involving, rippling with fascinating detail and filled with surprising characters.

[ [easyazon_link identifier=”B07FQTVPP3″ locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]Buy Now[/easyazon_link] ]

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