A companion volume to his Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (pbk £25), tracing Bach's evolution as a composer and looking deeply into his creative process.
The 1970s NME critic got bored with pop and discovered that the most radical music of all was classical. This is a personal and entertainingly idiosyncratic history of music.
This magnificent book - which takes its title from a remark of the singer Josephine Baker - gives us the cultural landscape of black genius from the mid C20th to the present. We are in extr... read more