Tokyo Blues

Tokyo Blues PDF Author: Franz Wiegand
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595178812
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Karl has been living a loveless existence with his drug-addicted wife and has reached the point where he needs to get away if he is to retain his mental balance. But his sense of responsibility to his wife and children has kept him chained to his situation creating a seemingly insoluble impasse.On a business trip to Japan he unexpectedly falls in love with a woman, Michiko, who has unresolved problems of her own, being bound to an unloving fiancé as a result of an arrangement between their parents. Two victims of circumstances, they desperately seek happiness and find it in this romantic, bittersweet tale of love set in modern Japan. In the knowledge that they cannot abdicate their responsibilities and must return to their previous ways of life, they attempt to make the most of their brief time together. Ephemeral as the flash of a firefly their intense passion flares brightly igniting a passionate affair that almost destroys one of them .

Tokyo Blues

Tokyo Blues PDF Author: Franz Wiegand
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595178812
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Get Book

Book Description
Karl has been living a loveless existence with his drug-addicted wife and has reached the point where he needs to get away if he is to retain his mental balance. But his sense of responsibility to his wife and children has kept him chained to his situation creating a seemingly insoluble impasse.On a business trip to Japan he unexpectedly falls in love with a woman, Michiko, who has unresolved problems of her own, being bound to an unloving fiancé as a result of an arrangement between their parents. Two victims of circumstances, they desperately seek happiness and find it in this romantic, bittersweet tale of love set in modern Japan. In the knowledge that they cannot abdicate their responsibilities and must return to their previous ways of life, they attempt to make the most of their brief time together. Ephemeral as the flash of a firefly their intense passion flares brightly igniting a passionate affair that almost destroys one of them .

Norwegian Wood

Norwegian Wood PDF Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307762718
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
From the bestselling author of Kafka on the Shore: A magnificent coming-of-age story steeped in nostalgia, “a masterly novel” (The New York Times Book Review) blending the music, the mood, and the ethos that were the sixties with a young man’s hopeless and heroic first love. Now with a new introduction by the author. Toru, a serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. As Naoko retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman. Stunning and elegiac, Norwegian Wood first propelled Haruki Murakami into the forefront of the literary scene.

Blue Nippon

Blue Nippon PDF Author: E. Taylor Atkins
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082238003X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Japan’s jazz community—both musicians and audience—has been begrudgingly recognized in the United States for its talent, knowledge, and level of appreciation. Underpinning this tentative admiration, however, has been a tacit agreement that, for cultural reasons, Japanese jazz “can’t swing.” In Blue Nippon E. Taylor Atkins shows how, strangely, Japan’s own attitude toward jazz is founded on this same ambivalence about its authenticity. Engagingly told through the voices of many musicians, Blue Nippon explores the true and legitimate nature of Japanese jazz. Atkins peers into 1920s dancehalls to examine the Japanese Jazz Age and reveal the origins of urban modernism with its new set of social mores, gender relations, and consumer practices. He shows how the interwar jazz period then became a troubling symbol of Japan’s intimacy with the West—but how, even during the Pacific war, the roots of jazz had taken hold too deeply for the “total jazz ban” that some nationalists desired. While the allied occupation was a setback in the search for an indigenous jazz sound, Japanese musicians again sought American validation. Atkins closes out his cultural history with an examination of the contemporary jazz scene that rose up out of Japan’s spectacular economic prominence in the 1960s and 1970s but then leveled off by the 1990s, as tensions over authenticity and identity persisted. With its depiction of jazz as a transforming global phenomenon, Blue Nippon will make enjoyable reading not only for jazz fans worldwide but also for ethnomusicologists, and students of cultural studies, Asian studies, and modernism.

San'ya Blues

San'ya Blues PDF Author: Edward Fowler
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501724150
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Over the years, Edward Fowler, an American academic, became a familiar presence in San'ya, a run-down neighborhood in northeastern Tokyo. The city's largest day-labor market, notorious for its population of casual laborers, drunks, gamblers, and vagrants, has been home for more than half a century to anywhere from five to fifteen thousand men who cluster in the mornings at a crossroads called Namidabashi (Bridge of Tears) in hopes of getting work. The day-labor market, along with gambling and prostitution, is run by Japan's organized crime syndicates, the yakuza. Working as a day laborer himself, Fowler kept a diary of his experiences. He also talked with day laborers and local merchants, union leaders and bureaucrats, gangsters and missionaries. The resulting oral histories, juxtaposed with Fowler's narrative and diary entries, bring to life a community on the margins of contemporary Japan.Located near a former outcaste neighborhood, on what was once a public execution ground, San'ya shows a hidden face of Japan and contradicts the common assumption of economic and social homogeneity. Fowler argues that differences in ethnicity and class, normally suppressed in mainstream Japanese society, are conspicuous in San'ya and similar communities. San'ya's largely middle-aged, male day-laborer population contains many individuals displaced by Japan's economic success, including migrants from village communities, castoffs from restructuring industries, and foreign workers from Korea and China. The neighborhood and its inhabitants serve as an economic buffer zone—they are the last to feel the effects of a boom and the first to feel a recession. They come alive in this book, telling urgent stories that personify such abstractions as the costs of modernization and the meaning of physical labor in postindustrial society.

Let's Get to the Nitty Gritty

Let's Get to the Nitty Gritty PDF Author: Horace Silver
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520253922
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Silver details the economic forces that persuaded him to put Silveto to rest and to return to the studios of such major jazz recording labels as Columbia, Impulse, and Verve, where he continued expanding his catalogue of new compositions and making recordings that are at least as impressive as his earlier work. Silver's irrepressible sense of humor combined with his distinctive spirituality make his account, which is well seasoned with anecdotes about the music, the musicians, and the milieu in which he worked and prospered, both entertaining and inspiring."--Jacket.

Blue Note

Blue Note PDF Author: Graham Marsh
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 9780811836883
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Smaller in trim size, greatly expanded in content, this compendium of Chronicle's classic Blue Note books is now an appealingly chunky paperback. Featuring 400 of the legendary covers, spanning the '40s to the '70s, features the greatest work of legendary Blue Note art director Reid Miles.

African American Jazz and Rap

African American Jazz and Rap PDF Author: James L. Conyers, Jr.
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786462388
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Music is an expressive voice of a culture, often more so than literature. While jazz and rap are musical genres popular among people of numerous racial and social backgrounds, they are truly important historically for their representation of and impact upon African American culture and traditions. Essays offer interdisciplinary study of jazz and rap as they relate to black culture in America. The essays are grouped under sections. One examines an Afrocentric approach to understanding jazz and rap; another, the history, culture, performers, instruments, and political role of jazz and rap. There are sections on the expressions of jazz in dance and literature; rap music as art, social commentary, and commodity; and the future. Each essay offers insight and thoughtful discourse on these popular musical styles and their roles within the black community and in American culture as a whole. References are included for each essay.

Tokyo blues

Tokyo blues PDF Author: Pia Hintze
Publisher: Wahlström & Widstrand
ISBN: 9146225633
Category : Fiction
Languages : sv
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Sanslöst rolig roman om kulturkrock och klimakterium – båda genomlidna i det neonblinkande Tokyo som bara långsamt avslöjar sin skönhet. Den erfarna psykoterapeuten Lola lämnar mot sin vilja jobbet, som blivit lite för mycket, barnen, som föralldel börjar bli vuxna, för att bli ofrivillig hemmafru i Tokyo. Tokyo är outhärdligt. Georg jobbar nästan jämt. Hettan dränker Lola i svett. Hur hittar man bort, hur hittar man hem, när man inte ens kan alfabetet? Hur handlar man mat när man inte har en aning om vad som finns i förpackningarna? Och så alla dessa människor som är överallt, överallt. De hjälpsamma kvinnorna i Fenno-Skandinaviska klubben rekommenderar trevliga kurser, som blomsterarrangemang i grupp eller att spela på stortrummor ... Men Lola vill bara jobba. Via minst sagt oväntade arbetsuppgifter och kontakter förälskar hon sig i människorna, Tokyo och livet.

Whose Blues?

Whose Blues? PDF Author: Adam Gussow
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469660377
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Mamie Smith's pathbreaking 1920 recording of "Crazy Blues" set the pop music world on fire, inaugurating a new African American market for "race records." Not long after, such records also brought black blues performance to an expanding international audience. A century later, the mainstream blues world has transformed into a multicultural and transnational melting pot, taking the music far beyond the black southern world of its origins. But not everybody is happy about that. If there's "No black. No white. Just the blues," as one familiar meme suggests, why do some blues people hear such pronouncements as an aggressive attempt at cultural appropriation and an erasure of traumatic histories that lie deep in the heart of the music? Then again, if "blues is black music," as some performers and critics insist, what should we make of the vibrant global blues scene, with its all-comers mix of nationalities and ethnicities? In Whose Blues?, award-winning blues scholar and performer Adam Gussow confronts these challenging questions head-on. Using blues literature and history as a cultural anchor, Gussow defines, interprets, and makes sense of the blues for the new millennium. Drawing on the blues tradition's major writers including W. C. Handy, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Amiri Baraka, and grounded in his first-person knowledge of the blues performance scene, Gussow's thought-provoking book kickstarts a long overdue conversation.

Popular Music in Japan

Popular Music in Japan PDF Author: Toru Mitsui
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501363875
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Popular music in Japan has been under the overwhelming influence of American, Latin American and European popular music remarkably since 1945, when Japan was defeated in World War II. Beginning with gunka and enka at the turn of the century, tracing the birth of hit songs in the record industry in the years preceding the War, and ranging to the adoption of Western genres after the War--the rise of Japanese folk and rock, domestic exoticism as a new trend and J-Pop--Popular Music in Japan is a comprehensive discussion of the evolution of popular music in Japan. In eight revised and updated essays written in English by renowned Japanese scholar Toru Mitsui, this book tells the story of popular music in Japan since the late 19th century when Japan began positively embracing the West.