Want the word on Buffy Sainte-Marie? Looking for the best powwow recordings? Wondering what else Jim Pepper cut besides “Witchi Tai To”? This book will answer those questions and more as it opens up the world of Native American music.

In addition to the widely heard sounds of Carlos Nakai’s flute, Native music embraces a wide range of forms: country and folk, jazz and swing, reggae and rap. Brian Wright-McLeod, producer/host of Canada’s longest-running Native radio program, has gathered the musicians and their music into this comprehensive reference, an authoritative source for biographies and discographies of hundreds of Native artists.

The Encyclopedia of Native Music recognizes the multifaceted contributions made by Native recording artists by tracing the history of their commercially released music. It provides an overview of the surprising abundance of recorded Native music while underlining its historical value.

With almost 1,800 entries spanning more than 100 years, this book leads readers from early performers of traditional songs like William Horncloud to artists of the new millennium such as Zotigh. Along the way, it includes entries for jazz and blues artists never widely acknowledged for their Native roots—Oscar Pettiford, Mildred Bailey, and Keely Smith—and traces the recording histories of contemporary performers like Rita Coolidge and Jimmy Carl Black, “the Indian of the group” in the original Mothers of Invention. It also includes film soundtracks and compilation albums that have been instrumental in bringing many artists to popular attention. In addition to music, it lists spoken-word recordings, including audio books, comedy, interviews, poetry, and more.

With this unprecedented breadth of coverage and extensively cross-referenced, The Encyclopedia of Native Music is an essential guide for enthusiasts and collectors. More than that, it is a gateway to the authentic music of North America—music of the people who have known this land from time immemorial and continue to celebrate it in sound.

This impressive compilation offers a nearly complete listing of sound recordings made by American minority artists prior to mid-1942. Organized by national group or language, the seven-volume set cites primary and secondary titles, composers, participating artists, instrumentation, date and place of recording, master and release numbers, and reissues in all formats. Because of its clear arrangements and indexes, it will be a unique and valuable tool for music and ethnic historians, folklorists, and others.
 

This impressive compilation offers a nearly complete listing of sound recordings made by American minority artists prior to mid-1942. Organized by national group or language, the seven-volume set cites primary and secondary titles, composers, participating artists, instrumentation, date and place of recording, master and release numbers, and reissues in all formats. Because of its clear arrangements and indexes, it will be a unique and valuable tool for music and ethnic historians, folklorists, and others.
 

This impressive compilation offers a nearly complete listing of sound recordings made by American minority artists prior to mid-1942. Organized by national group or language, the seven-volume set cites primary and secondary titles, composers, participating artists, instrumentation, date and place of recording, master and release numbers, and reissues in all formats. Because of its clear arrangements and indexes, it will be a unique and valuable tool for music and ethnic historians, folklorists, and others.

Winner of the ARSC Award for Excellence in the Field of Recorded Country, Folk, or Ethnic Music, 1991.

This impressive compilation offers a nearly complete listing of sound recordings made by American minority artists prior to mid-1942. Organized by national group or language, the seven-volume set cites primary and secondary titles, composers, participating artists, instrumentation, date and place of recording, master and release numbers, and reissues in all formats. Because of its clear arrangements and indexes, it will be a unique and valuable tool for music and ethnic historians, folklorists, and others.
 

This impressive compilation offers a nearly complete listing of sound recordings made by American minority artists prior to mid-1942. Organized by national group or language, the seven-volume set cites primary and secondary titles, composers, participating artists, instrumentation, date and place of recording, master and release numbers, and reissues in all formats. Because of its clear arrangements and indexes, it will be a unique and valuable tool for music and ethnic historians, folklorists, and others.
 

This impressive compilation offers a nearly complete listing of sound recordings made by American minority artists prior to mid-1942. Organized by national group or language, the seven-volume set cites primary and secondary titles, composers, participating artists, instrumentation, date and place of recording, master and release numbers, and reissues in all formats. Because of its clear arrangements and indexes, it will be a unique and valuable tool for music and ethnic historians, folklorists, and others.
 

This impressive compilation offers a nearly complete listing of sound recordings made by American minority artists prior to mid-1942. Organized by national group or language, the seven-volume set cites primary and secondary titles, composers, participating artists, instrumentation, date and place of recording, master and release numbers, and reissues in all formats. Because of its clear arrangements and indexes, it will be a unique and valuable tool for music and ethnic historians, folklorists, and others.
 

Today, jazz is considered high art, America’s national music, and the catalog of its recordings—its discography—is often taken for granted. But behind jazz discography is a fraught and highly colorful history of research, fanaticism, and the intense desire to know who played what, where, and when. This history gets its first full-length treatment in Bruce D. Epperson’s More Important Than the Music. Following the dedicated few who sought to keep jazz’s legacy organized, Epperson tells a fascinating story of archival pursuit in the face of negligence and deception, a tale that saw curses and threats regularly employed, with fisticuffs and lawsuits only slightly rarer.

Epperson examines the documentation of recorded jazz from its casual origins as a novelty in the 1920s and ’30s, through the overwhelming deluge of 12-inch vinyl records in the middle of the twentieth century, to the use of computers by today’s discographers. Though he focuses much of his attention on comprehensive discographies, he also examines the development of a variety of related listings, such as buyer’s guides and library catalogs, and he closes with a look toward discography’s future. From the little black book to the full-featured online database, More Important Than the Music offers a history not just of jazz discography but of the profoundly human desire to preserve history itself.

From scouring flea markets and eBay to maxing out their credit cards, record collectors will do just about anything to score a long-sought-after album. In Vinyl Freak, music writer, curator, and collector John Corbett burrows deep inside the record fiend’s mind, documenting and reflecting on his decades-long love affair with vinyl. Discussing more than 200 rare and out-of-print LPs, Vinyl Freak is composed in part of Corbett's long-running DownBeat magazine column of the same name, which was devoted to records that had not appeared on CD. In other essays where he combines memoir and criticism, Corbett considers the current vinyl boom, explains why vinyl is his preferred medium, profiles collector subcultures, and recounts his adventures assembling the Alton Abraham Sun Ra Archive, an event so all-consuming that he claims it cured his record-collecting addiction. Perfect for vinyl newbies and veteran crate diggers alike, Vinyl Freak plumbs the motivations that drive Corbett and collectors everywhere.

A comprehensive study of jazz great Charlie Parker, including details of record dates, more than 200 musical illustrations, and biographical material arranged chronologically and linked with Parker’s recordings. The “Bird Stories” are all here, from Parker’s Kansas City roots to his untimely death, as well as the seminal journal article on Parker’s music, “Ornithology” that appeared in the Journal of Jazz Studies.