Jazz

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 ...

From Fred Astaire to Raven Wilkinson, Misty Copeland to Janet Jackson, Dance Legends Alphabet shimmies and shakes through eras and genres to presen...

Jazz and Totalitarianism examines jazz in a range of regimes that in significant ways may be described as totalitarian, historically covering the p...

The Gerry Mulligan Quartet, founded in Los Angeles in 1952, was widely acclaimed as the first small ensemble in jazz that did not include a chordal...

Part design history, part trip down musical memory lane, this anthology of jazz album artwork is above all a treasure trove of creative and cultura...

**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...

The first comprehensive biography of the Swing Era's pioneering virtuoso drummer and bandleader William Henry Chick Webb (1905-39) was one of the ...

Today, jazz history is dominated by iconic figures who have taken on an almost God-like status. From Satchmo to Duke, Bird to Trane, these legendar...

Duke Ellington (18991974) is widely considered the jazz tradition's most celebrated composer. This engaging yet scholarly volume explores his long ...

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...

Jazz can be uplifting, stimulating, sensual, and spiritual. Yet when writers turn to this form of music, they almost always imagine it in terms of ...

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

In 1966, journalist Charles Suhor wrote that New Orleans jazz was ready for its new Golden Age. Thomas W. Jacobsen's The New Orleans Jazz Scene, 19...

Sophisticated Giant presents the life and legacy of tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon (19231990), one of the major innovators of modern jazz. In a co...

In this captivating memoir, the first full-length account of life in the Arkestra by any of its members, Harlem-born trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah recou...