100 books like Lester Leaps in

Throughout her career, Billie Holiday always gave credit for her unique singing style to Louis Armstrong, not just the way he played the trumpet, which clearly influenced her, but the vernacular approach he had to singing.

Armstrong’s musicality allowed him to enjoy a one-of-a-kind career in show business, which Ricky Riccardi lovingly captures in his book, at least the part covering the final years of Armstrong’s life. Riccardi is particularly good on “Hello Dolly!,” Armstrong’s swan song.

One of the treasures of American show business is Hazel Scott. A child prodigy on piano who attended Julliard, a headliner at Café Society thanks to Billie Holiday’s mentorship, and eventually the wife of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., she was the first African American to host her own television show, “The Hazel Scott Show,” in 1950.

A confrontation with the House Un-American Activities Committee prompted the cancellation of her network show, which led her to go into a kind of exile in Paris where she set up a salon that saw as guests everyone from Lester Young to the Beatles.

Karen Chilton vividly documents the life and times of the singer in this book. I love the book because it captures the artistry of a true original. In the future, more attention should be paid to Hazel Scott, who has become show business history’s forgotten genius.

Starting in the 1930s and going through the 1950s, one of the centers of jazz in the United States was in Manhattan on 52nd Street between Fifth and Seventh avenues. Clubs like the Famous Door, Three Deuces, Onyx, Kelly’s Stable, and Club 18 would become legendary in jazz circles. Jazz royalty, from Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie to Coleman Hawkins and Billie Holiday, played in these clubs.

In his chronicle of 52nd Street, Arnold Shaw provides a fly-on-the-wall account of what it was like to play and visit the clubs based on interviews (some of them quoted at length) from musicians who worked the clubs to entertainment figures who frequented them. Billie Holiday is a presence throughout the book from her early beginnings when she was not accepted because of her singing style to eventually becoming one of The Street’s main draws.

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. 

This is a story of Jazz by the musicians who made it. Hear Me Talkin' to Ya is a wide study of the Jazz at its source (New Orleans) through the era of Big Bands and into Modern Jazz, from Kid Ory to Dave Brubeck. This book doesn’t have a narrative or authors’ opinions. This book features passages quoted by Billie Holiday, Mary Lou Williams, Lil Harden Armstrong, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Othello Tinsley, Dizzy Gillespie, and a hundred other musicians.

We’ve entered a second era of inclusion. Women now play an essential role in creating music. Add Lizzie Miles, Anita O’Day, Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Mary Ann McCall, Alberta Hunter, and Leora Henderson and we get a different perspective of the evolution of music culture.  

I love this book because it showcases the history of jazz and how it began in New Orleans. But what I love most of all is that the sounds of jazz instruments are included in the book.

Push the buttons, and you will hear drums. Push another button, a tuba—another, a trumpet, etc. I also heard singers scatting and singers improvising. Hearing the sounds of jazz brings the music to life.

Hettie Cohen defied the stifling conventions of her middle-class Jewish Queens upbringing to live the life with her husband, the poet LeRoi Jones in a Bowery loft. When the Black Power movement beckoned, he changed his name to Amiri Baraka and left her. Hettie Jones’ memoir brings to life the Village of the late 1950s and 60s, complete with the beats, their women, jazz spots, and the rich literary scene. A little-known gem about a very specific cultural moment in New York, told in a clear, honest voice. 

Iconic feminist, philosopher, and activist Angela Y. Davis put African American women at the center of the story of the blues, expanding our understanding of a genre usually presented as the purview of male artists. Discussing the music and careers of 1920s blues superstars Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith and 1930s jazz vocalist Billie Holiday, who was deeply influenced by the blues, Davis approaches the blues as music innovated, popularized, and consumed by African American women. She pays close attention to the impact of gender, race, and class on artists and audiences, and shows how these artists and their fans used blues music as entertainment, self-expression, social commentary, political critique, resistance, and survival.

Hari’s Chasing the Scream is not an exhaustively researched book but it still merits listing given how viscerally the author addresses the history of the global war on drugs in the light of his own personal addiction. Hari shines in his depiction of circa 1930s U.S. Drug Cop #1, Henry J. Anslinger, who, among other dubious endeavors, sought to throw the book at jazz singer Billie Holiday, who also happened to be a heroin addict.  

This is the book that changed my view of music and made me realise that I could write about popular music from a sociological perspective and not bore people to death!

Simon combines the punchy directness of a music critic with a thorough understanding of music as a social force that shapes our lives, loves, and identities. The book demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge of 20th-century popular music.

I often start any research project by using the index to look up related terms and ask: “What does Simon say?” I particularly like the sections on how star persona works, and the chapter on technology is a must, too.