JAZZ JUMPS ON TO A BIGGER BOOKSHELF

JAZZ JUMPS ON TO A BIGGER BOOKSHELF

by Norman Warwick

Sly Stone´s autobiography won The Los Angeles Times Audiobook Award: Sly Stone’s autobiography, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) won the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Achievement in Audiobook production. The audiobook is voiced by narrator Dior Graham, and features an introduction written and read by Questlove. It also includes three never-before-heard songs and jingles from when Sly Stone was a DJ on KSOL.

Not many memoirs are generational events. But when Sly Stone, one of the few true musical geniuses of the last century, decides to finally tell his life story, it can’t be called anything else.

As the front man for the sixties pop-rock-funk band Sly and the Family Stone, a songwriter who created some of the most memorable anthems of the 1960s and 1970s (“Everyday People,” “Family Affair”), and a performer who electrified audiences at Woodstock and elsewhere, Sly Stone’s influence on modern music and culture is indisputable. But as much as people know the music, the man remains a mystery. After a rapid rise to superstardom, Sly spent decades in the grips of addiction.

Now he is ready to relate the ups and downs and ins and outs of his amazing life in his memoir, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin). The book moves from Sly’s early career as a radio DJ and record producer through the dizzying heights of the San Francisco music scene in the late 1960s and into the darker, denser life (and music) of 1970s and 1980s Los Angeles. Set on stages and in mansions, in the company of family and of other celebrities, it’s a story about flawed humanity and flawless artistry.

Written with Ben Greenman, who has also worked on memoirs with George Clinton and Brian Wilson, and in collaboration with Arlene Hirschkowitz, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) is a vivid, gripping, sometimes terrifying, and ultimately affirming tour through Sly’s life and career. Like Sly, it’s honest and playful, sharp and blunt, emotional and analytical, always moving and never standing still.

Early Jazz: A Concise Introduction, from Its Beginnings Through 1929, is a new book written by Fumi Tomita, Associate Professor of Jazz Pedagogy and Performance at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, offering an overview of the beginnings of jazz from its 19th-century roots through 1929, when elements of the Swing Era began to emerge. Written as an introduction for fans, students, musicians, historians, scholars and anyone interested in this era of jazz history, Early Jazz is defined via an official press release as “the first book on early jazz history in over 50 years and fills a compelling need for an update that reflects on recent research.”