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Andy Beta is an award-winning arts and music writer. His writing on rock, jazz, experimental and electronic music has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and many more. He lives in New York City with his family.
An accessible, definitive biography of Alice Coltrane, [the] misunderstood jazz musician and guru ... Beta's book does a valuable service in its precision, empathy and musical understanding, the book scours off the condescension that's clung to her reputation and reveals her anew. An invaluable life of a pioneering artist, only now beginning to be fully understood * KIRKUS REVIEWS * The significance of Alice Coltrane's presence in 20th century music cannot be overstated. Andy Beta's Cosmic Music is a remarkable detailing of this visionary woman's vocation in devotion to a sanctified art. From her childhood playing piano in the community of Pentecostal and Baptist churches, where ecstatic transcendence was at the heart of practice to her engagement with the Detroit Jazz scene, and finding a kindred spirit in a life shared with the great John Coltrane, her music expressed a timeless expression of both divinity and dignity * THURSTON MOORE * Andy Beta's work on Alice Coltrane clarifies and contextualizes a still-extraordinary presence in American music * BEN RATLIFF, author of Coltrane: The Story of a Sound * With lyrical and cinematic storytelling, Andy Beta takes us on a peripatetic journey in the footsteps of one of the most significant musical innovators and spiritual leaders of the past century * AIDAN LEVY, author of Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins * Andy Beta brings Alice Coltrane out of her famous husband's shadow, giving us a richly contextualized arc of her fascinating life. His deep research, clear-eyed insight, and poetic language make the abstractions of improvised music and spirituality into the stuff of story. Cosmic Music is a major contribution to the literature of music and spirituality * MICHELLE MERCER, author of Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell's Blue Period * For decades Alice Coltrane's life has been as elusive as her art, but Cosmic Music is the definitive text, bringing her into vivid detail while losing none of her fantastic mystery: a must read * LIAM INSCOE-JONES, author of Songs in the Key of MP3 *
