Collectors of illustrator R. Crumb's work prize the music-oriented trading card sets he created in the 1980s. Now they appear together for the first time in book form, along with a CD of music selected and compiled by Crumb himself.

An interpretive history of America's pre-rock, popular commercial music spanning 1900-1950. The author examines both popular music stars who ruled the airwaves, sold the most records, and were featured in major motion pictures, and performers in the musical underground: jazz, blues, and country. Chapters are arranged chronologically, with biographies of important musicians and numerous photographs. Contains a discography and videography as well as indexes of musical performers, contributors and music titles. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Horace Porter is the chair of African American World Studies and professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Stealing Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwin and one of the editors of Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. The first book to reassess Ralph Ellison after his death and the posthumous publication ofJuneteenth, his second novel, Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in America explores Ellison's writings and views on American culture through the lens of jazz music. Horace Porter's groundbreaking study addresses Ellison's jazz background, including his essays and comments about jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker. Porter further examines the influences of Ellington and Armstrong as sources of the writer's personal and artistic inspiration and highlights the significance of Ellison's camaraderie with two African American friends and fellow jazz fans—the writer Albert Murray and the painter Romare Bearden. Most notably, Jazz Country demonstrates how Ellison appropriated jazz techniques in his two novels, Invisible Man and Juneteenth. Using jazz as the key metaphor, Porter refocuses old interpretations of Ellison by placing jazz in the foreground and by emphasizing, especially as revealed in his essays, the power of Ellison's thought and cultural perception. The self-proclaimed “custodian of American culture,” Ellison offers a vision of “jazz-shaped” America—a world of improvisation, individualism, and infinite possibility.

Since its inception in 1997,the EuropeanConferenceon Researchand Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL) has come a long way, creating a strong interdisciplinarycommunityofresearchersandpractitionersinthe?eldofdigital libraries. We are proud to present the proceedings of ECDL 2005, the ninth conference in this series, which, following Pisa (1997), Heraklion (1998), Paris (1999), Lisbon (2000), Darmstadt (2001), Rome (2002), Trondheim (2003), and Bath (2004), took place on September 18–23, 2005 in Vienna, Austria. ECDL 2005 featured separate calls for paper and poster submissions, resu- ing in 130 full papers and 32 posters being submitted to the conference. All - pers were subject to a thorough peer-review process, with an 87-person-strong Program Committee and a further 68 additional reviewers from 35 countries from basically all continents sharing the tremendous review load, producing - tween three and four detailed reviews per paper. Based on these, as well as on the discussion that took place during a one-week on-line PC discussion phase, 41 papers were ?nally selected for inclusion in the conference program during a 1. 5 day PC meeting, resulting in an acceptance rate of only 32%. Furthermore, 17 paper submissions were accepted for poster presentations with an additional 13 posters being accepted based on a simpli?ed review process of 2–3 reviews per poster from the poster submission track. Both the full papers as well as extended abstracts of the posters presented at ECDL 2005 are provided in these proceedings.

As the first organic overview of the history of jazz in Europe and covering the subject from its inception to the present day, the volume provides a unique, authoritative addition to the musicological literature.

An exploration of the pervasive influence of jazz on all forms of American music, this work maps the unexpected musical and cultural links between Louis Armstrong, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Herbie Hancock and many others.

A cultural and social study of the origins and evolution of “rocknroll”.