Here are 100 books that Leader of the Band fans have personally recommended if you like
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Since childhood, I have been obsessed with understanding everything — science and the universe. Now, in this age of the JWST and a burgeoning space industry, I do sub-quantum mechanics research at an international physics think-tank, The Quantum Bicycle Society. My own hard sci-fi novel is intended to help publicize these scientific advances, as well as the behavioral psychology concepts that are the subject of my next nonfiction book, The Animal In The Mirror. The books on this list represent the foundation of inspiration that propelled my formative sci-fi journey, stories that also shine the light of insight onto our shared, instinctive nature.
This is my favorite hard sci-fi classic. I love the beautiful mix of real science (wormholes excepted), compelling story, and characters, and it touches on both first contact and the way in which human nature might cause us to react to it. That is the power combo, in my opinion!
The movie of the book was very good — Robert Zemeckis is a brilliant director — although it left out some fantastic details that, as a math and science fan, I really loved! (I won’t spoil it here; it’s too good.)
Astronomy teaches us that our bodies are quite literally star stuff, chemical elements made inside exploding stars. For much of my life, I studied and researched astronomy in universities, and in observatories on remote and beautiful mountain tops and in space. I explored the cosmos for its own sake, but I came to realise also that we are literally and metaphorically a part of the Universe, not apart from it. Just as the science of astronomy has done for me, these novels put humanity against the same backdrop: cosmic lives seen through women’s eyes.
Caroline Herschel was the sister of William Herschel, a church organist and piano tutor, latterly the discoverer of the planet Uranus, a mapper of the skies, and an astronomer at the court of King George III. At first, she devoted herself to her brother, acting as his housekeeper, musical accompanist, and PA in Bath and then as his scientific assistant in Slough, near Windsor Castle. She submerged her own volition to his. But gradually she found her own life in astronomy, and discovered 8 comets, pooh-poohed as small by the King but much appreciated by Queen Charlotte and her ladies. She became known internationally in her own right. She lived to a considerable old age in Hannover, where she was born. The book is a fictionalised but real-life story that echoes between the eighteenth century and our own time.
This is a story of love and astronomy; music and silence; secrets and truth-telling; of world-changing discoveries, and unrequited desire. Moving from York in the 1780s to Regency Bath, and then to Hanover in the 1840s, it concerns the lives of three people-all astronomers. There is Caroline, torn between her passion for music and her passion for the stars; John, deaf from childhood, whose extraordinary mathematical gifts afford him perspectives not available to others; and Edward, friend and mentor to Caroline and to John, who must conceal his innermost feelings from them both. All three find fulfilment in the heavens…
Astronomy teaches us that our bodies are quite literally star stuff, chemical elements made inside exploding stars. For much of my life, I studied and researched astronomy in universities, and in observatories on remote and beautiful mountain tops and in space. I explored the cosmos for its own sake, but I came to realise also that we are literally and metaphorically a part of the Universe, not apart from it. Just as the science of astronomy has done for me, these novels put humanity against the same backdrop: cosmic lives seen through women’s eyes.
Scottish astronomer and novelist Pippa Goldschmidt mixes astronomy and fiction in her novel. The book provides insight into the way that astronomy is carried out now in modern, remote, mountain-top observatories and in space (I can vouch for its verisimilitude). Jeanette is a young, lonely, junior researcher working in a university department dominated by male egos and incompetents. She puts academic politics and unsatisfactory affairs aside and travels to a mountain-top observatory in Chile for her research, making an unexpected discovery that throws her into conflict with her colleagues. Like her love life, her scientific life spirals out of her control: the Universe is ordered by science but her life and the lives of scientists are not.
A blackly comic campus satire combined with a heart-breaking family mystery, The Falling Sky brilliantly mixes fiction and astronomy into a fascinating, compelling, and moving narrative
Jeanette is a young, solitary post-doctoral researcher who has dedicated her life to studying astronomy. Struggling to compete in a prestigious university department dominated by egos and incompetents, and caught in a cycle of brief and unsatisfying affairs, she travels to a mountaintop observatory in Chile to focus on her research. There Jeanette stumbles upon evidence that will challenge the fundamentals of the universe, drawing her into conflict with her colleagues and the scientific…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
Astronomy teaches us that our bodies are quite literally star stuff, chemical elements made inside exploding stars. For much of my life, I studied and researched astronomy in universities, and in observatories on remote and beautiful mountain tops and in space. I explored the cosmos for its own sake, but I came to realise also that we are literally and metaphorically a part of the Universe, not apart from it. Just as the science of astronomy has done for me, these novels put humanity against the same backdrop: cosmic lives seen through women’s eyes.
In this Wessex novel by Thomas Hardy, Lady Constantine’s explorer-husband has been missing for years when she offers patronage to the Byronic astronomer, Swithin St. Cleeve, letting him use a tower on her estate as an observatory. He shows her the stars through his telescope, passionately explaining what lies behind the astronomical images. Presuming her husband dead, she secretly marries St Cleeve, but a complicated legacy intrudes, and it transpires that her husband has been living with an African princess before blowing his head off. Suicide, bigamy, a lost legacy, an illegitimate child, the plot lines (there are many more than I have mentioned!) are resolved by numerous and dramatic deaths. This scandalous romance is melodramatically plotted, but gains a certain sublime power as an “emotional history of two infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe".
TWO ON A TOWER (1882) is a tale of star-crossed love in which Hardy sets the emotional lives of his two lovers against the background of the stellar universe. The unhappily married Lady Constantine breaks all the rules of social decorum when she falls in love with Swithin St. Cleeve, an astronomer who is ten years her junior. Her husband's death leaves the lovers free to marry, but the discovery of a legacy forces them apart. This is Hardy's most complete treatment of the theme of love across the class and age divide and the fullest expression of his fascination…
I was born in 1970. From my earliest memory there was music. But it’s never been just about the music, I have a natural curiosity for the people who make that music. The artist on the album cover, but also the side musicians, the producers, engineers, and promoters. I’m also fascinated by the roadmap from blues to rock to Laurel Canyon to disco to punk and on and on. Real music infuses and informs the fiction I write — by reading real-life accounts and listening to the songs, I’m put in the world from which it was all born.
I was writing my novel in 2013, but 20 years earlier I’d picked up a book by the jazz drummer Arthur Taylor. I didn’t realize how much it influenced me until I went back to it again and again as I worked to get dialog and cadence and the ‘feel’ of jazz on paper. I prefer memoirs because I want to hear the shorthand, slang, and shortcuts artists take. This book has that and more. Taylor interviews the best of the best — Ornette, Roach, Dizzy, Nina. I like to think had my protagonist been real, he’d have been included in this list. I owe a lot to this book and if you’re looking to learn not just about jazz music, but jazz culture and life, this is a great start.
Notes and Tones is one of the most controversial, honest, and insightful books ever written about jazz. As a black musician himself, Arthur Taylor was able to ask his subjects hard questions about the role of black artists in a white society. Free to speak their minds, these musicians offer startling insights into their music, their lives, and the creative process itself. This expanded edition is supplemented with previously unpublished interviews with Dexter Gordon and Thelonious Monk, a new introduction by the author, and new photographs. Notes and Tones consists of twenty-nine no-holds-barred conversations which drummer Arthur Taylor held with…
Lilian Terry’s background is quite out-of-the-ordinary. Born in Egypt in 1930 to Maltese and Italian parents, she undertook academic studies in Cairo and Florence. Terry studied classical piano until age 17, developing an interest in jazz in her early teens. She participated in a variety of ways with jazz in Europe, beginning in the 1950s. As a singer, she was an active performer and recording artist. At the same time, she produced radio and television shows for Italy’s RAI network, and this activity led to some of her encounters with major figures of American jazz. Seven of these interactions (most of which spanned decades) are the subject of Dizzy, Duke, Brother Ray, and Friends.
For the same reason I would recommend attending any musical performance by John Birks ‘Dizzy’ Gillespie: Sheer entertainment, surprisingly touching aspects of his personality, instant feelings of friendship shared, and his unbreakable optimism, with which to face and endure whatever life had in store for him. In Italy he was a beloved “Italian,” officially elected honorary citizen of Bassano del Grappa, where we had opened the “Dizzy Gillespie Popular School of Music” that carried an integrated section for blind students. When his memoirs were published he asked me to translate the book into Italian, therefore I had to read it with particular concentration. Many were the moments I would have to shut the book and laugh out loud! Oh yes, Diz the Wiz, or The Joyous Soul of Jazz!
You don't have to know John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie's songs to feel his influence. The self-taught trumpet player rose from a poor but musically driven upbringing to become a jazz mastermind, founding the bebop movement and giving rise to Afro-Cuban music.
This extensive biography is intertwined with reflections from famous Gillespie associates Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Mary Lou Williams, Ella Fitzgerald, and many others. They provide numerous perspectives of Gillespie's early start on the road to fame and the spirited times that would follow.
James Malloy is a ferry captain--or used to be, until he was unceremoniously fired and replaced by a "girl" named Courtney Farris. Now, instead of piloting Brenton Island’s daily lifeline to the glitzy docks of Newport, Rhode Island, James spends his days beached, bitter, and bored.
I can’t imagine going through a day without listening to music. I remember buying my first Beatles album at eight years old. I saw Elvis on his last tour, Whitney Houston on her first, and Barbra Streisand on her comeback tour—twice. I remember listening to “Kind of Blue” the first time. I remember seeing Ella Fitzgerald late in her career at a club in Houston; her body was failing her—she had to sit in a chair to sing—but her voice was as beautiful as ever. Of all the artists I’ve admired over the years, the one whose work has consistently spoken to me most profoundly is Billie Holiday.
One of the important figures in the world of jazz for many years was Leonard Feather. He started his career as a jazz writer—writing the first profile of Billie Holiday—but eventually became a songwriter and producer. He produced Billie Holiday’s highly successful 1954 European Tour called Club USA.
Well into his career, he collected this book of essays about the jazz figures he knew well: Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Ray Ellis, among others. I really like his essay on Billie, whom he knew so well she became his daughter’s godmother because he was able to relate events about which he knew because he was in the room with her when they happened.
If you want to meet jazz luminaires first-hand, trust Leonard Feather to provide the introduction.
Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Norman Granz, Oscar Peterson, Ray Charles, Don Ellis, and Miles Davis,these are the dozen jazz figures whom Leonard Feather chose to describe the development of jazz. This is the first Feather book to examine in-depth the innovative figures who have led the way throughout the music's history. As composer, producer, and for almost half-a-century one of its leading critics, Feather has a unique perspective of these jazz immortals. He has worked with and known all of them. "These are portraits of human beings first, analyses of…
My father, a huge Ella Fitzgerald fan, had a bunch of her records, and took us to hear her live once. So I knew mid-century jazz, but I had yet to discover its early origins. From the first, I knew my trilogy was set in the 1920s and one of the main characters had to be a jazz musician. I began collecting dozens of recordings by early jazz and blues artists, reading books about them, and I developed an enthusiasm for these early musicians. I found that the original “jazz maniacs” had the same passion for their music that I felt about rock and roll in the early 1960s.
I have so many reasons why this is one of my all-time favorite books. Berton’s descriptions of music, specifically jazz or music in general, are superb. Ralph Berton describes himself as a precocious 13-year-old (an understatement!), when in 1924 he meets Bix Beiderbecke, seven years his senior, and idolizes him. This relationship is a great part of the book’s charm. The Berton family—with its vaudeville background, two famous musical brothers (besides the child genius Ralph), and a Jewish mother—is another part of the appeal. But the heart of the book is his affectionate, penetrating portrait of Bix, derived from personal experience. He examines the myths and legends, sometimes debunking and sometimes reinforcing them. A magical, bittersweet book that often brought me to tears. Exceptional writing.
As Nat Hentoff says, "Hearing Bix for the first time was like waking up to the first day of spring." Bix has always inspired such acclaim, for he was an unmatched master of the cornet. Ralph Berton was privileged enough to have been a fan,and younger brother of Bix's drummer,just as Beiderbecke's genius was flowering, before he died in 1931 at age twenty-eight. Listening from behind the piano, tagging along to honky-tonks and jam sessions, Berton heard some of the most extraordinary music of the century, and he brings Bix and his era alive with a remarkable combination of the…
I grew up hearing jazz thanks to my dad, a big swing fan who allegedly played Duke Ellington for me in the crib. My father couldn’t believe it when I developed a taste for “modern jazz,” bebop, even Coltrane, but he never threw me out. Fifty years later I still love to play jazz on drums and listen to as much as I can. But along the way, I realized the world might be better served by me writing about the music than trying to make a living performing it. I had the great privilege of studying jazz in graduate school and wrote about big-band jazz for my first book, which helped launch my career.
Space Is the Place opened so many windows for me into a world of esoteric spirituality fused with mind-blowing musical and theatrical creativity. John Szwed was a member of my PhD dissertation committee, although it was pretty hard to track him down, and he was wrapping up this book as I finished my own. I’d seen Sun Ra at my college and thought of the Arkestra as a kind of spaced-out novelty act, not knowing anything about Ra’s history: his celestial epiphanies; his long immersion in big-band jazz, including his stint with the great Fletcher Henderson; the cadre of stellar musicians he recruited and molded for the Arkestra; his entrepreneurial streak. When I turned to the study of music and spirituality, Szwed’s biography became an indispensable source. Afrofuturism has become a very hot topic in contemporary cultural studies, and there’s no better way into its arcane mysteries than through this…
Considered by many to be a founder of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra-aka Herman Blount-was a composer, keyboardist, bandleader, philosopher, entrepreneur, poet, and self-proclaimed extraterrestrial from Saturn. He recorded over 200 albums with his Arkestra, which, dressed in Egypto-space costumes, played everything from boogie-woogie and swing to fusion and free jazz. John Szwed's Space is the Place is the definitive biography of this musical polymath, who was one of the twentieth century's greatest avant-garde artists and intellectuals. Charting the whole of Sun Ra's life and career, Szwed outlines how after years in Chicago as a blues and swing band pianist, Sun Ra…
Return to Hope Creek is a second-chance rural romance set in Australia.
Stella Simpson's career and engagement are over. She returns to the rural community of Hope Creek to heal, unaware her high school and college sweetheart, Mitchell Scott, has also moved back to town to do some healing of…
I’ve loved jazz ever since I learned to play the clarinet as a child. My two great loves in life have been music and books, so it made sense to combine the two things and write novels with a link to jazz. These books are some of my favourites with a jazz theme. I promise that even if you’re not a jazz fan, these are all excellent novels, to be enjoyed with or without music playing in the background!
I love untold stories – those that look at people who history has often ignored. There are a lot of novels set in WWII, but this is the only one I’ve read that looks at what it was like to be an Afro-German during that period.
Hiero Falk is a mixed-race jazz trumpeter, member of a band who has been banned from playing live under Nazi laws. After escaping with two of his African-American bandmates to Paris, Hiero is forced into hiding as the trio struggle to get out of occupied France. There was so much history here that felt new to me and I was fascinated by Hiero’s story.
Man Booker Prize Finalist 2011 An Oprah Magazine Best Book of the Year
Shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction
Berlin, 1939. The Hot Time Swingers, a popular jazz band, has been forbidden to play by the Nazis. Their young trumpet-player Hieronymus Falk, declared a musical genius by none other than Louis Armstrong, is arrested in a Paris café. He is never heard from again. He was twenty years old, a German citizen. And he was black.
Berlin, 1952. Falk is a jazz legend. Hot Time Swingers band members Sid Griffiths and…
