Ashley Kahn

Ashley Kahn

Ashley Kahn is a multiple Grammy Award–winning music historian, author, and producer. He cowrote Carlos Santana’s autobiography "The Universal Tone," and has written books on legendary recordings by Miles Davis and John Coltrane. In the late 1980s he was a member of the Graceland tour production team, and tour manager for Ladysmith Black Mambazo. He teaches at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute for Recorded Music. His most recent book, "Days of Miracle and Wonder," tells the full story of Paul Simon's process creating the album Graceland.

Awards: Grammy Award for Album Notes (2 -- 2014, 2025); Jazz Journalists Assoc. Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism; ASCAP-Deems Taylor (3)

Communities: Family lives in Tucson (brother, sister, stepmother)

Books:

Days of Miracle and Wonder

Paul Simon and the Trials and Triumphs of Graceland
Music / Performing Arts
Simon and Schuster
August 2026
ISBN 9781668206751
hardcover, 320 pages

The definitive story of the making and legacy of Graceland, Paul Simon’s career-topping 1986 album, drawn from extensive research and exclusive interviews with nearly 100 participants and witnesses: musicians, producers, engineers, record executives and journalists from Africa, the US, and Europe. In 1984, Paul Simon was at a professional and personal low. His new marriage was failing and his career was in danger of stalling. He was forty-two, navigating a digital age, searching for inspiration in a scene driven by music videos, synthesizers, and drum machines. Driving around that summer, a bootleg cassette of “township jive”—the street music of South Africa—kept him company. Lent to him by a friend, it reminded Simon of the sound and the joy of the early days of rock and roll. He became drawn to the idea of recording with the musicians on that tape. But South Africa was in the thrall of a racist apartheid system, and with economic and cultural boycotts in place, such an undertaking could prove daunting. He became determined to find the right conditions to allow for a collaboration. Simon took a fateful trip to Johannesburg in 1985. It would turn out to be the first step on a musical journey that would lead him to New York, Los Angeles, Louisiana, and London, and eventually to the release of Graceland, a critical and commercial triumph, winning multiple Grammys, selling 16 million records, and spawning a five-year, worldwide tour. Days of Miracle and Wonder is the first book to tell the full story of Graceland, offering windows into Simon’s creative process, the technical innovations that brought them to life, the people and places that made the album possible, the forces that helped the album achieve mainstream reach, and the controversies that the music raised—and which remain today. It sheds light on a rare cultural moment, when America opened its doors to the sounds and styles of Africa and other faraway lands. This is an informed, heartfelt celebration of Simon’s magnum opus, a recording forged in a tense cultural moment, but suffused with hope, change, and a sense of global connection. More/less

George Harrison on George Harrison

Interviews and Encounters
Music / Performing Arts
Chicago Review Press
August 2020
ISBN 9781641600545
ePub, 433 pages

• 2022 ASCAP Foundation Special Recognition Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Book Award in Pop Music George Harrison on George Harrison is an authoritative, chronologically arranged anthology of Harrison's most revealing and illuminating interviews, personal correspondence, and writings, spanning the years 1962 to 2001. This compendium of his words and ideas proves that point repeatedly, revealing his passion for music, his focus on spirituality, and his responsibility as a celebrity, as well as a sense of deep commitment and humor. Though known as the "Quiet Beatle," Harrison was arguably the most thoughtful and certainly the most outspoken of the famous four. More/less