Mr. Bradley, AKA The Poison Coyote Kid, is a ledendary multi-instrumentalist/rancontuer living and playing in the Seattle area. (At a jam session I attended he played hours guitar backing up Romanian and Greek fiddlers in odd time signatures and then whipped out a fiddle and ripped throughBob Wills' version of "done Gone.") A wise music fan would be on the lookout for his singular LP release, "The Return of the Poison Coyote Kid." 

This little book got him is A LOT of trouble when it was first published and many folks still avoid eye contact and give him a wide berth at  festivals and other gatherings of folkniks. As he explained it to me, he intended it simply to be a handbook of good manners designed for those folks who ran off into the hinterlands looking for old people they could hassle about music.  His reflections on cultural differences between the applied ethnomusicologist (Yankee in this case) and the tradition bearer (a Southerner like myself) caught my attention,:

"Consider a Brooklyn bluegrasser at a 1970 Virginia Fiddlers ConventionA northern villager knows you're supposed to take public transportation, resist US war involvement, minimize meat and junk food consumption, excoriate polluters, and meet women and all socially concious people as fellow and equals. Whereas southerners know that construction pays best and everybody's OK in thier place, and that you're supposed to drive with courage, respect your cousin in uniform, hunt well, shoot straight, suspect the cosmopolitians, hold your alcohol, be gallant to the ladies when appropriate, and be a connoisseur of good prime rib. If these villagers stick to musical topics, all will go well enough socially, but if not it is easy to see how a heartfelt opinion on either side might lead to hurt feelings and hostility on the other."

As a Southern Jewish Bluegrass fan/musician, I often found myself in the presence of folks at a picking session who would normally be burning a cross on my front lawn, so I could really relate.

Hank is (in)famous for presenting his original fiddle tunes as learned from some old master he found in the hills somewhere. The last chapter includes 12 of these tunes with titles like "Dance of the Music Critics" and "Chase the Squid," and they are quite good as well. Chock full of interesting insights on teh process of the "folk revival," and a overall great read, Mark says check it out. Copies can be secured contacting the publisher, 8033 14th Ave NE, Seattle WA 98115.

"The critics who write about jazz, they don‚t know nothing. This book is gonna straighten a lot of things out."

Got this at a Half Price Books in Dallas TX in 1986. Not but 3 weeks later I had my first upright and 10 days later my first gig, so you can say this here book started me off. I had successfully hid from the upright since High School due mainly to the staid classical instruction I had received there. In the first chapter, Pops put those fears to rest: 

"The guys that teach music, they're another bunch; they don‚t know about it. The teachers always want to tell you to finger the strings on the ends of your fingers. You can't finger for tin can music like that, it's too delicate. You got to grip those babies to get a tone. All the tone is in your left hand." 

What the hell is he talking about? I still am not sure what he means, but it was absolutely liberating to be told it was OK to get you a bass and just start playing the damn thing, just get a good tone and you'd be alright.

Most of the book is a direct telling of the entire history of jazz from a man who was there to see it all happen. Storyville, the Marable steam ships up the Mississippi river, Chicago with Louis Armstrong and then onto swing and bop in NYC. He starts playing marches and schottisches on a homemade bass (strings made of twine rubbed together with rosin) and ends up in a bop bass quartet. Inspirational on so many levels.

Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Master Musician Within
By Kenny Werner
1993, Jamey Abersold Jazz, book w/ CD

After a disasterous tour where my band mates stayed stoned, drunk and abusive, I woke up every morning not being able to feel my fingertips and eventually returning home dead broke, I decided that some kind of change was in order. My hands and arms were making horrible cracking sounds that eventually became cripplingly painfull, and like most self employed musicians I had no health insurance. (The first medication I was given made me so ill that I nearly collapsed at the Calgary Folk Festival, which BTW is a very good place to get sick at.) The only way I could pay for the insurance to manage my condition was to keep playing through the constant pain OR wake up and figure out how to make my living some other way. I started by getting a job running a register, graveyard shift, at my local all-night Kinko's. One bright morning after my shift one day I stepped into a nearby bookstore and spyed this thin tome.

Here's where it got to me:

"Did you know that it's not even important that you play another note of
music again? In fact, many of you have a greater chance of happiness if you STOP PLAYING MUSIC RIGHT NOW! UNLESS...you change your relationship to playing and to yourself."

As I read on, I felt like there was a man in the next room beating on a gong at the end of every paragraph. Right on baby. No jive gigs, just jive people with toxic energy, and do your best to avoid them. Most guys don‚t even know why they do what they do, much less ever ask the question, and the incongruity of artistic ambition and real world realities ahs driven many a great man to destruction, (insert you're musical hero's name here.)

I could do without the new-agey bent that fills the latter chapters, and I'm scared to even play the attached "meditation" CD altogether, but all in all a real practical thought provoker. These days, I LOVE playing music and eagerly look forward to every opportunity to do so with a zeal I haven't encountered since I first started playing.

The Art of Practicing: A Guide to Making Music from the Heart
By Madeline Bruser
1997, Bell Tower

Another good volume on connecting mind, body and spirit (referred to as "heart" in her work) from a concert pianist. Has entire chapters devoted to the holding your instrument, complete with photos, in ways that keep you both relaxed and focused with good posture. Not a lot of mention of the bass, but you can get the jist by analyzing how your body moves (or doesn't) while you play so can avoid long term repetitive motion injuries, like I got.