Dancing in Your Head

This collection of essays by contemporary music critic Gene Santoro details the full range of the contemporary American musical idiom. With jazz as his starting point, Santoro traces the blues of the Mississippi Bayou to jazz and beyond, to the cutting edge of popular music.

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This collection of brilliant essays by noted contemporary music critic Gene Santoro shows the full range of the American musical idiom. With jazz as his starting point, Santoro takes us from the blues of the Mississippi Bayou to Ellington to rock guitarists and finally to today's cutting edge. There are several pieces on Miles Davis, others on Ornette Coleman, Django Reinhardt, Charlie Mingus, and many more recent jazz musicians. Among the non-jazz figures featured are legendary blues singer Robert Johnson, godfather of soul James Brown, the Grateful Dead, and doyen of underground rock, Lou Reed. In its most recent pieces the book also gives powerful insights into the contemporary pop scene.