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Yeah, THIS is the Nick Tosches we want! Tosches has a way of chronicling the diseased, mobbed up underbelly of the 20th Century music rackets that's simply unrivaled – it's gut level brilliant and street smart writing like no one does anymore. Save The Last Dance For Satan is a more fleshed out and newly spun continuation of material published more than a decade ago as Hipsters And Hoodlums in Vanity Fair (boy, mainstream magazine content sure has changed a bunch since 2000) – chronicling the sleaze and criminality at the core of the 50s & 60s music biz. It's great! His best stuff has often read with the sweaty, intoxicating allure of seedy pulp storytelling, so it's with the utmost pleasure to see his work put out by Kicks Books - which literally puts Tosches' work in just that kind of old school hip pocket paperback! He joins Andre Williams (whose "Jailbait" single is mentioned early in this book as the badass antidote to mid 50s candy-coated rock & roll that it most certainly was) and Sun Ra at Kicks. A couple of Tosches' more recent books have been a tough slog – more about his own near obsessive search for impossibly hidden subjects than anything else – but this slim 120 page tome is the opposite – it has us slobbering for more!

British punk, right up from the trenches – presented here in a surprisingly well-detailed book that really gets at the heart of the key years of 1976 and 1977! Dave Thompson writes the book as compelling narrative – history, but filled with the sort of passion that would have grabbed you if you were there (and don't pretend you were!) – served up with a cast of characters that includes a few surprises, plus the key figures you'd expect. There's a handful of black and white images, but the story here's the main thing – and Dave does a great job of telling it. 325 pages, softcover.

Incredible images from one of the most legendary reggae labels ever – the mighty Studio One, home to decades of classic music, put together with equally-classic images on the record covers! The book is maybe even more of a treasure than some other album art books you'll find – because over the years, many of the Studio One images were pretty watered-down on the market – either pressed up on poor paper that never stood the test of time, or cropped and cribbed from for mainstream reissue packages – but never with the same sort of beauty you'll find in these images! The book is done in the same totally great style as other Soul Jazz books – and features full album images on 12" by 12" pages – all in brilliant color, too. There's some helpful notes at the beginning, and throughout in a few spots – and the book is super-heavy, and 216 pages in all – with some smaller images at the back.

A massive jazz book by Gary Giddins – author of the much respected Visions Of Jazz – and featuring more 140+ articles from a nearly 15 year period! Many of the articles here are from Giddins' Weather Bird column in The Village Voice – with pieces on Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Cassandra Wilson., Benny Carter, Lee Konitz, Rosemary Clooney, Herb Jeffries, Roy Hargrove, Marc Ribot, Terence Blanchard, David S Ware, The Bad Plus, Abbey Lincoln and many more. Hardcover, 632 pages.