Jazz

In Soundscapes of Liberation, Celeste Day Moore traces the popularization of African American music in postwar France, where it signaled new forms ...

In Soundscapes of Liberation, Celeste Day Moore traces the popularization of African American music in postwar France, where it signaled new forms ...

What is jazz? How does it differ from other kinds of music? To what extent is it an important subject for thinking about aesthetic questions? Philo...

In The Performance of Authenticity: The Makings of Jazz and the Self in Autobiography Teófilo Espada-Brignoni analyzes the autobiographies of New O...

What, where, and when is jazz? To most of us jazz means small combos, made up mostly of men, performing improvisationally in urban club venues. But...

Thomas “Fats” Waller was a legendary stride pianist, a wildly entertaining comedic singer, and the composer of such classic melodies as “Honeysuckl...

Birds of Fire brings overdue critical attention to fusion, a musical idiom that emerged as young musicians blended elements of jazz, rock, and funk...

“One of the greatest artists our country has is Benny Golson. He is not only a great musician, but an original and fabulous composer. He is inventi...

In a piano factory tucked away in Richmond, Indiana, Gennett Records produced thousands of records featuring obscure musicians from hotel orchestra...

In this remarkable book, Steven Feld, pioneer of the anthropology of sound, listens to the vernacular cosmopolitanism of jazz players in Ghana. Som...

An in-depth exploration of the style and influence of Pat Metheny, a truly distinctive musical voice of our time. Guitarist and composer Pat Methen...

The Jazz Life of Dr. Billy Taylor: America's Classical Musician is the autobiography of the legendary jazz ambassador whose work spans more than si...

Django Generations shows how relationships between racial identities, jazz, and national belonging become entangled in France. Jazz manouche—a genr...

Time Must-Read Books of 2024 Independent Best Non-Fiction Books 2024 Mojo Books of the Year 2024 "A vibrant, multifac...

Nigel Kennedy changed the course of classical music in the late 1980s with his interpretation of Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’. He was revolutionary: in...

Saxophone virtuoso Charlie "Bird" Parker began playing professionally in his early teens, became a heroin addict at 16, changed the course of music...

The story of Black British music is a five-hundred-year journey from the court of King Henry VIII to the ‘Ends’ of South London; from Africa to the...

Bop Apocalypse, a narrative history from master storyteller Martin Torgoff, details the rise of early drug culture in America by weaving together t...

Musical Echoes tells the life story of the South African jazz vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin. Born in Cape Town in the 1930s, Benjamin came to know ...

Leonard Bernstein's gifts for drama and connecting with popular audiences made him a central figure in twentieth century American music. Though a B...

**As featured on Barack Obama's Summer 2022 Reading List**Winner of the Gordon Burn PrizeWinner of the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in...

There is an ever-increasing number of books on improvisation, ones that richly recount experiences in the heat of the creative moment, theorize on ...

**FINALIST for the 2022 PROSE Award in Music & the Performing Arts** **Certificate of Merit, Best Historical Research on Recorded Jazz, given b...

Saxophone virtuoso Charlie "Bird" Parker began playing professionally in his early teens, became a heroin addict at 16, changed the course of music...

A groundbreaking study of the trailblazing music of Chicago's AACM, a leader in the world of jazz and experimental music. Founded on Chicago's ...

In this remarkable book, Steven Feld, pioneer of the anthropology of sound, listens to the vernacular cosmopolitanism of jazz players in Ghana. Som...

This book about Miles Dewey Davis is more psychologically driven than a straight biography; but it does cover his musical career, as well his spiri...

This book examines Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Miles Davis as distinctively global symbols of threatening and nonthreatening black masculi...

The Jazz Republic examines jazz music and the jazz artists who shaped Germany’s exposure to this African American art form from 1919 through 1933. ...

Sophisticated Giant presents the life and legacy of tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon (1923–1990), one of the major innovators of modern jazz. In a c...