For the month of July we have lowered the e-book list price of four music titles in the University of Illinois Press catalog to $2.99.

Carla Bley by Amy C. Beal
This is the first comprehensive treatment of the remarkable music and influence of Carla Bley, a highly innovative American jazz composer, pianist, organist, band leader, and activist. With fastidious attention to Bley’s diverse compositions over the last fifty years spanning critical moments in jazz and experimental music history, Amy C. Beal tenders a long-overdue representation of a major figure in American music. “Beal … expertly contextualizes Bley’s career within the landscapes of emergent avant-garde, free jazz, and experimental music.”–Library Journal Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the Google Play version here. Buy the Nook version here.

Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music by John Caps
Henry Mancini, the first publicly successful and personally recognizable film composer in history, has practically become a Hollywood brand name. In this first comprehensive study of Mancini’s music, John Caps traces Mancini’s collaborations with important directors and shows how he homed in on specific dramatic or comic aspects of each film to create musical effects through clever instrumentation, eloquent melodies, and the strong narrative qualities of his scores. Accessible and engaging, this fresh view of Mancini’s oeuvre and influence will delight and inform fans of film and popular music. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the Google Play version here. Buy the Nook version here.

Blues Before Sunrise: The Radio Interviews by Steve Cushing
This collection assembles the best interviews from Steve Cushing’s long-running radio program Blues Before Sunrise, the nationally syndicated, award-winning program focusing on vintage blues and R&B. As both an observer and performer, Cushing has been involved with the blues scene in Chicago for decades. His candid, colorful interviews with prominent blues players, producers, and deejays reveal the behind-the-scenes world of the formative years of recorded blues. Many of these oral histories detail the careers of lesser-known but greatly influential blues performers and promoters. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the Google Play version here. Buy the Nook version here.

Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music by Douglas Harrison
In this ambitious book on southern gospel music, Douglas Harrison reexamines the music’s historical emergence and its function as a modern cultural phenomenon. Rather than seeing the music as a single rhetoric focusing on the afterlife as compensation for worldly sacrifice, Harrison presents southern gospel as a network of interconnected messages that evangelical Christians use to make individual sense of both Protestant theological doctrines and their own lived experiences. Harrison explores how listeners and consumers of southern gospel integrate its lyrics and music into their own religious experience, building up individual—and potentially subversive—meanings beneath a surface of evangelical consensus. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the Google Play version here. Buy the Nook version here.