The Beatles and Duke Ellington’s Orchestra stand as the two greatest types of collaboration in music history. Duke College or university musicologist Thomas Brothers delivers a family portrait of the creative process at work, demonstrating which the cooperative technique at the foundation of the two artist-groups was the principal reason for their unmatched musical success.

While clarifying the historical record of who wrote what, with whom, and exactly how, Brothers brings days gone by alive with photos, anecdotes, and a lot more than thirty years of music understanding that reverberates through every web page, and analysis of songs from Lennon and McCartney’s ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ to Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Chelsea Bridge.’ Help! identifies in rich detail the music and mastery of two cultural leaders whose reputation hasn’t dimmed, and the procedure of cooperation that allowed them to accomplish an artistic eyesight higher than the amount of their parts.