End of the year music

The Best Books of 2007 lists are already pouring out. This past weekend, the Kansas City Star posted their top 100 books of the year. Kansas City prides itself on a rich musical history, and the Star has 3 books in a music category that, in their style and in the nuance of their selection, mirror the kind of books we're trying to promote for visual art:

• Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California, by Peter La Chappell. On the road, with a beat.
• Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, by Ben Ratliff. Musicians may enjoy the jargon; non-musicians, the look into the legend.
• Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, by Oliver Sacks. Why humans groove.

This also reminds me to point out Da Capo Press's music books website. Da Capo is a respected independent publisher across a range of categories, but they've built this specialist site dedicated to their books on music. Da Capo publishes a Best Music Writing book every year, and from what I can tell, the first titles they published when they started up were all music related. So, it makes sense that they try to build on this niche. Unfortunately, other than their fantastic tagline "Hear Music. Read Da Capo." the site itself is a disappointment. Nonetheless, much of what Da Capo does, or tries to do around this particular niche is admirable.