Havana, New Year’s Eve 1957, a terrorist bomb rips through the Tropicana nightclub. King Bongo, a rogue Cuban-American, tortured by a mysterious past and possessed of a mythic musical talent, goes on the hunt for the culprits, and for his sister, Cuba’s most exotic showgirl, who disappeared in the explosion. Navigating Havana’s maze of Colonial backstreets, red-light districts, swank country clubs, and opulent casinos, Bongo encounters an outrageous cast of characters—American hit men, decadent movie stars, prophetic shoeshine boys, and a beautiful American socialite. At the center of the mystery is a sinister secret police operative with whom Bongo is destined to have a lethal showdown.

CMJ New Music Monthly, the first consumer magazine to include a bound-in CD sampler, is the leading publication for the emerging music enthusiast. NMM is a monthly magazine with interviews, reviews, and special features. Each magazine comes with a CD of 15-24 songs by well-established bands, unsigned bands and everything in between. It is published by CMJ Network, Inc.

Thomas Sanchez, the author of the epic Key West novel Mile Zero, returns to the tropics with King Bongo--a stunning story of desire and political danger set against the glamour, intrigue, and corruption of 1950s Havana. On New Year's Eve 1957, a bomb rips through Havana's famous Tropicana nightclub. King Bongo, a rogue Cuban American, tortured by a mysterious past and possessing a mythic musical talent, goes on the hunt for the culprits, and for his sister, known as the Panther, Cuba's most exotic showgirl, who disappeared in the explosion. Bongo navigates Havana's maze of colonial backstreets, red-light districts, Chinatown alleys, swank country clubs, and opulent gambling casinos, becoming ensnared in the morally complicated and often outrageous lives of underworld thugs and molls, of aging movie stars and their teenage mistresses, of idealistic shoeshine boys and political assassins. Ultimately, he faces his most dangerous challenges from the glamorous Mrs. Armstrong--an American socialite spinning a plot of erotic intrigue--and in a showdown with Humberto Zapata, a Machiavellian operative in Batista's murderous secret police. Sophisticated and riveting, a new noir novel, in a style--and evoking a world--Thomas Sanchez has masterfully made his own.

The greatest albums of all time . . . and how they happened. Organised chronologically and spanning seven decades, The MOJO Collection presents an authoritative and engaging guide to the history of the pop album via hundreds of long-playing masterpieces, from the much-loved to the little known. From The Beatles to The Verve, from Duke Ellington to King Tubby and from Peggy Lee to Sly Stone, hundreds of albums are covered in detail with chart histories, full track and personnel listings and further listening suggestions. There's also exhaustive coverage of the soundtrack and hit collections that every home should have. Like all collections, there are records you listen to constantly, albums you've forgotten, albums you hardly play, albums you love guiltily and albums you thought you were alone in treasuring, proving The MOJO Collection to be an essential purchase for those who love and live music.

Here's an entire book devoted to the all too oftenoverlooked Latin instrument, the bongo drums. Trevor Salloum guides you on an inspired informative, andeducational musical journey; offering many valuable insights of playing this instrument as well as revealing its colorful history. This text features jazz, rock, Danzon, Mozambique, and bomba patterns with fills,exercises, and performance techniques to get you going in these styles. Maintenance, characteristic rhythmic patterns, and important artists in the evolution of bongo technique are also covered in depth. The companion online audio features recordings of the rhythm patterns discussed in the book

A decade ago, Manu Chao's band, Mano Negra, toured Colombia by train, negotiating with government troops and rebels - an episode described at the time as 'less like a rock'n'roll tour - more like Napoleon's retreat from Moscow'. That's Manu in a nutshell. He does everything differently. He is a multi-million selling artist who prefers sleeping on friends' floors to five-star hotels, an anti-globalisation activist who hangs out with prostitute-activists in Madrid and Zapatista leader Comandante Marcos in Chiapas, a recluse who is at home singing in front of 100,000 people in stadiums in Latin America or festivals in Europe. Clandestino has been five years in the writing, as Peter Culshaw followed Manu around the world, invited at a moment's notice to head to the Sahara, or Brazil, or to Buenos Aires, where Manu was making a record with mental asylum inmates. The result is one of the most fascinating music biographies we're ever likely to read.