New Books in Music

This panel discussion will explore the remarkable influence of Latin American music and dance on the culture of Yiddish speaking communities in the United States. Ronald Robboy will discuss Latin American musical influences upon Yiddish theater composers, including Sholom Secunda, Abraham Ellstein, and Alexander Olshanetsky; Sonia Gollance will discuss the popularity of dances like the Tango and Mambo in the Borscht Belt, as exemplified by movies like Dirty Dancing and Mamboniks; and Josh Kun will discuss the influence of Latin American music on post-war Jewish music and the influence of Jewish music on U.S. Latino/a artists.

This event forms part of Carnegie Hall’s Nuestros sonidos festival.

This panel discussion originally took place on March 10, 2025.
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With his shag haircut and white Stratocaster guitar, Jeff Beck was an
icon known and loved by millions. Yet somehow, he maintained the
ineffable low profile cool of a cult hero as he glided through six
decades of musical trends with nary a lapse in taste. Not to say he ever
played it safe. What other guitarist can lay claim to performing with
opera star Luciano Pavarotti, mainstream television personality Kelly
Clarkson, and professional degenerates like Guns N’ Roses with equal
grace and wit? Or as Beck himself once quipped, “I’m an awkward son of a
bitch when it comes to doing the expected.”

In Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story (Da
Capo, 2026)​, Brad Tolinski and Chris Gill return to chart the
unexplored life of rock’s greatest and perhaps most enigmatic
instrumentalist. Culled from approximately 30 hours of interviews with
the late guitarist himself, numerous conversations with those closest to
him, and extensive research, the book sheds new light on the genius
that Jimmy Page once said, “shifted the whole sound and face of electric
guitar music.”
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Minimalist Music
(Bloomsbury, 2026) looks critically into the music's past, shows how
the genre thrives across styles, and points the way toward minimalism's
ongoing future.

Minimalism as a genre is best defined not by any style or flavor but
by its means. Certain rhythms and chords in other music may identify
things like jazz or bossa nova or reggae; take those same elements and
put them through the processes of minimalism and you have minimalism
with the hues of other musics.

A still young genre with ancient roots, minimalism is much less any
kind of style than a practice, a manner of making music. Reviving those
means and applying them to contemporary sounds and experiences, the
pioneers of minimalism created a new and avant-garde music that
immediately communicated its power to listeners of all kinds. The global
appeal of minimalism and the way the methods adapt to myriad styles
open up a view into how music actually works as an art and an
experience, how through time it connects in a fundamental way to how we
as humans listen.

George Grella, Jr. has written about music and culture for over
thirty years for print and online publications, and has contributed to
the Grove Dictionary of Music and the Library of Congress' National
Recording Registry. He is Music Editor at The Brooklyn Rail, publishes the Kill Yr Idols newsletter, and is the author of Miles Davis' Bitches Brew (Bloomsbury, 2015). He has played jazz, classical, and improvised music from CBGB to Carnegie Hall.

George Grella on Bluesky and Kill Yr Idols newsletter.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World
(Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio
107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival.

Bradley on Facebook and Bluesky.
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Who gets to be a creative worker? In Blame the Intern: On (Not) Breaking Into the Creative Economy, (Princeton University Press, 2026) Alexandre Frenette, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University,
examines the relationship between work and education in the difficult
moment of the early career transition from university to industry.
Drawing on a detailed case study of the music industry, the book
explains and critiques the way internships have come to dominate routes
into many careers in contemporary society. An accessible yet
theoretically rich read, the book will be of interest to creative
workers at any point in their career, as well as sociologists and
humanities scholars, along with any reader interested in how and why our
workplaces are so unequal.
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Owning My Masters (Mastered) is a digital archive of original rap music and spoken word poetry containing two volumes of music, an annotated timeline, videos, and a digital book. In this project, A.D. Carson exposes the artificial boundaries imposed on understood ideas about knowledge production in academia by employing hip-hop creative and compositional practices to interrogate ideas of citizenship, history, historical imagination, race, home, and humanness. Using sampled and live instrumentation and repurposed music, film, and news clips, an introductory video, and original rap lyrics, heoffers a new examination of how to create theory through hip-hop.

The unmastered album was originally submitted to Clemson University in South Carolina as the author’s dissertation, composed against the backdrop of the growing unrest across the U.S. and the world in response to the public attention to the deaths of Black people, many at the hands of police and vigilantes. As such, the songs highlight outlooks on Black life in America—on campuses and in communities across the country—and how they fit with geographic and temporal place and space. For this publication, the tracks have been mastered, and Carson has written a new introduction to contextualize and reflect on the moment in which the songs were written. It is a 2026 ACLS Open Access Multimodal Book Prize Finalist.

Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle.
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