100 books like Space Is the Place

By John Szwed,

Here are 100 books that Space Is the Place fans have personally recommended if you like Space Is the Place. Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation

Katherine Giuffre Author Of Outrage: The Arts and the Creation of Modernity

From my list on maverick creativity.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve spent my career as a sociologist studying how creative people work, what social settings are most conducive to creativity, and how to foster creativity for everyone in our daily lives. I know that creativity is often not easy and can even be met with hostility much more frequently than we might think. Creativity is, after all, a type of deviance and creative people can face real obstacles in finding and following their vision. But a richer understanding of how and why creativity happens – and of its obstacles – can be a tool for making a more vibrant, creative, inclusive, and just world.

Katherine's book list on maverick creativity

Katherine Giuffre Why did Katherine love this book?

How do jazz musicians think about what they are doing when they are improvising within a group? How do they learn to do such a thing in the first place – going their own way, but still going there together?

This is an immersion into the minds of musicians, starting with their earliest days and going through the rigors of learning their craft and then mastering it. The combination of discipline and freedom, hard work and wild inventive joy, finding an individual voice, and being part of the larger whole – the things that make improvisation a breath-taking artistic high-wire act – come together in this book.

I can’t carry a tune in a bucket, but this book made me wish I was a jazz musician.

By Paul F. Berliner,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Thinking in Jazz as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This text reveals how musicians, both individually and collectively, learn to improvise. It aims to illuminate the distinctive creative processes that comprise improvisation. Chronicling leading musicians from their first encounters with jazz to the development of a unique improvisatory voice, Paul Berliner demonstrates that a lifetime of preparation lies behind the skilled improviser's every note. Berliner's integration of data concerning musical development, the rigorous practice and thought artists devote to jazz outside performance, and the complexities of composing in the moment leads to a new understanding of jazz improvisation as a language, an aesthetic and a tradition. The product of…


Book cover of Stomping the Blues

David W. Stowe Author Of Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America

From my list on the social history of jazz.

Why am I passionate about this?

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.

David's book list on the social history of jazz

David W. Stowe Why did David love this book?

I came across this book when I decided to focus my graduate study on the history of jazz and was reading everything I could find. It’s a short book, full of incredible vintage photographs, and it taught me so much about what swing is, how music and dance are joined at the hip. How it’s all rooted in the blues. And about the link between the “Saturday Night Function” of celebrating life with music and dance, followed a few hours later by the “Sunday Morning Function,” singing and celebrating God and community in church. The two are not all that far apart. Along with Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray was probably the first author to write about jazz with a real sense of lyricism and poetry. In this book, the writing itself carries the energy and exuberance of jazz.

By Albert Murray,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Stomping the Blues as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this classic work of American music writing, renowned critic Albert Murray argues beautifully and authoritatively that "the blues as such are synonymous with low spirits. Not only is its express purpose to make people feel good, which is to say in high spirits, but in the process of doing so it is actually expected to generate a disposition that is both elegantly playful and heroic in its nonchalance."

In Stomping the Blues Murray explores its history, influences, development, and meaning as only he can. More than two hundred vintage photographs capture the ambiance Murray evokes in lyrical prose. Only…


Book cover of Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times

David W. Stowe Author Of Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America

From my list on the social history of jazz.

Why am I passionate about this?

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.

David's book list on the social history of jazz

David W. Stowe Why did David love this book?

Everyone knows that jazz is intimately and inextricably linked to Africa, but no book does a better job of breaking down just how strong this relationship is. Pianist Randy Weston and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik are pretty well known, but Kelley uncovers lots of fascinating new material on both musicians and their transnational connections. Drummer Guy Warren and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin were new to me and both turned out to have incredible backstories. Kelley is as compelling on the jazz scenes of Cape Town and Lagos as he is on the more familiar haunts of Chicago and New York. It was such an exciting historical moment, with one African nation after another breaking free of their colonial subjugators. The jazz world was bursting with creativity. Anything seemed possible. Kelley knows the jazz world inside and out and writes beautifully.

By Robin D. G. Kelley,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Africa Speaks, America Answers as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, pianist Randy Weston and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik celebrated with song the revolutions spreading across Africa. In Ghana and South Africa, drummer Guy Warren and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin fused local musical forms with the dizzying innovations of modern jazz. These four were among hundreds of musicians in the 1950s and '60s who forged connections between jazz and Africa that definitively reshaped both their music and the world.

Each artist identified in particular ways with Africa's struggle for liberation and made music dedicated to, or inspired by, demands for independence and self-determination. That music was the wild, boundary-breaking…


Book cover of Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution

David W. Stowe Author Of Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America

From my list on the social history of jazz.

Why am I passionate about this?

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.

David's book list on the social history of jazz

David W. Stowe Why did David love this book?

Michael Denning was my dissertation advisor in grad school and one of the most impressive scholars of American culture that I know. What I like about Noise Uprising is that it gives us a whole new perspective on the beginnings of jazz. No longer is American jazz at the center of the universe. Instead, it’s a small piece of a larger mosaic of popular music that stretched from Havana and Rio to Seville, Cairo, Jakarta, and Honolulu. Before reading this book I had no idea that musical recording even went on in all these far-flung places, beginning in 1925, even before the great wave of recordings appeared from Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Jelly Roll Morton. We learn about the origin and first recordings of such major genres as samba, son, tango, flamenco, tarab, kroncong, and hula. All of these styles were deeply embedded in the social and political struggles…

By Michael Denning,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Noise Uprising as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In a handful of years between the development of electrical recording in 1925 and the outset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, the soundscape of modern music unfolded in a series of relatively unnoticed recording sessions around the world. These included the recording of tango in Buenos Aires, son in Havana, and samba in Rio; of hula in Honolulu, shidaiqu in Shanghai, and kroncong in Jakarta, and; of taraab in East Africa and marabi in Johannesburg. In this ground-breaking study, Michael Denning draws a global map of a musical revolution that had more profound consequences than the "modern"…


Book cover of Forces in Motion: Anthony Braxton and the Meta-Reality of Creative Music: Interviews and Tour Notes, England 1985

Philip Watson Author Of Bill Frisell, Beautiful Dreamer: The Guitarist Who Changed the Sound of American Music

From my list on jazz (and a whole lot more).

Why am I passionate about this?

I've mostly made my living as a feature writer, covering a broad range of subjects—from 9/11 to the Poker Million tournament, Miles Davis to (a film version of) James Joyce’s Ulysses, British soldiers injured in Afghanistan to the Peace One Day campaign—for numerous UK and Irish newspapers and magazines, including GQ, where I was formerly deputy editor, and Esquire, where I was editor-at-large. I've also written extensively about music, jazz in particular; musicians I've interviewed include Nick Cave, Gil Scott-Heron, McCoy Tyner, Wynton Marsalis, and Maria Schneider. My first book, a biography of the American guitarist Bill Frisell, was published by Faber in the spring of 2022.

Philip's book list on jazz (and a whole lot more)

Philip Watson Why did Philip love this book?

Don’t let the (original) lengthy subtitle, with its nearly forty-year-old date reference, put you off; this is a deeply original and highly engaging account of the music and philosophy of one of America’s most prolific and consistently creative musicians: composer, improviser, educator and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton. With a double narrative that deftly alternates between lofty discussions of subjects such as metaphysics, mysticism, language, and astrology, and the daily grind of a challenging twelve-date tour of England by a Braxton quartet in the winter of 1985, Forces in Motion cleverly captures much of the complexity, intelligence, ambition and humour of its uncompromising subject. At one point Lock describes Braxton as “an alchemist, a man who opens doors you didn’t know existed”; the same can be said of the book itself. A perfect marriage of musician and writer. 

By Graham Lock,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Forces in Motion as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"Absolutely essential reading." — The Wire
One of modern music's towering figures, composer and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton has redefined critical concepts of jazz and the wider world of creative music. The Chicago native's works range from an early piece for 100 tubas to proposed compositions for orchestras on different planets. A modern classic, Forces in Motion follows Braxton's lauded quartet on a 1985 tour of England, noting his opinions of his musical predecessors — including Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Karlheinz Stockhausen — as well as his thoughts on racism and poverty.
For this new 30th anniversary edition, Graham Lock…


Book cover of The History of Bones

Chris Payne Author Of Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo's Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008

From my list on music and New York City.

Why am I passionate about this?

Where Are Your Boys is the book I always wanted to write. Watching emo bands like My Chemical Romance and Paramore soar from suburbs to stardom during my high school years inspired me to take writing seriously, that a kid like me growing up in New Jersey with few connections to the media industry could find a backdoor in, because those bands did, too. With its dense population, adjacency to New York City, and a multitude of record stores and all-ages shows, New Jersey was the setting for much of emo's 2000s boom and the home of My Chemical Romance and many other important bands. 

Chris' book list on music and New York City

Chris Payne Why did Chris love this book?

John Lurie makes me think of what it means to be an artist. It’s funny, though, because after watching three seasons of his TV show, I still wasn’t entirely sure who John Lurie was or why he had an HBO series.

Painting With John is hosted by a 60-something Lurie living in the Caribbean, slowed by chronic illness, musing on past misadventures with New York City icons like Basquiat and Bourdain while getting lost in his dreamlike paintings. Lurie's 2021 memoir fleshes out his story just enough: jazz saxophonist turned reluctant art house film star who side-stepped significant fame and money by unfortunate events and steadfastly chose creativity over compromise.

On the page, Lurie’s telling of these events is mystifying. I’m looking forward to a life of creativity with his voice in my head.

By John Lurie,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The History of Bones as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The quintessential depiction of 1980s New York and the downtown scene from the artist, actor, musician, and composer John Lurie

“A picaresque roller coaster of a story, with staggering amounts of sex and drugs and the perpetual quest to retain some kind of artistic integrity.”—The New York Times

In the tornado that was downtown New York in the 1980s, John Lurie stood at the vortex. After founding the band The Lounge Lizards with his brother, Evan, in 1979, Lurie quickly became a centrifugal figure in the world of outsider artists, cutting-edge filmmakers, and cultural rebels. Now Lurie vibrantly brings to…


Book cover of Remembering Bix: A Memoir Of The Jazz Age

Jeff Stookey Author Of Chicago Blues

From my list on 1920s Chicago jazz musicians.

Why am I passionate about this?

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.

Jeff's book list on 1920s Chicago jazz musicians

Jeff Stookey Why did Jeff love this book?

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.

By Ralph Berton,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Remembering Bix as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

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…


Book cover of To Be, or Not... to Bop

Lilian Terry Author Of Dizzy, Duke, Brother Ray, and Friends: On and Off the Record with Jazz Greats

From my list on to welcome you to the magical world of jazz.

Why am I passionate about this?

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.

Lilian's book list on to welcome you to the magical world of jazz

Lilian Terry Why did Lilian love this book?

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!     

By Dizzy Gillespie, Al Fraser,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked To Be, or Not... to Bop as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

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.

To Be, or Not . . . to Bop is a unique…


Book cover of We Called It Music: A Generation of Jazz

Jeff Stookey Author Of Chicago Blues

From my list on 1920s Chicago jazz musicians.

Why am I passionate about this?

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.

Jeff's book list on 1920s Chicago jazz musicians

Jeff Stookey Why did Jeff love this book?

I highly value Condon’s ability to describe the daily anxiety and desperation of the poor jazz musicians, who constantly struggled to find work and pay the rent. He does so with great good humor. He tells a good story and he’s got a million of them, including a few about gangsters, but mostly about the many great jazz musicians like Bix Beiderbecke, whom he worked with and knew well. His many terse stories prove that brevity is the soul of wit. His dialogue is worthy of Ben Hecht—he’s good at wisecracks. I was sorry when the book came to an end.

By Eddie Condon, Thomas Joseph Sugrue,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked We Called It Music as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Eddie Condon (1905-1973) pioneered a kind of jazz popularly known as Chicago-Dixieland, though musicians refer to it simply as Condon style. Played by small ensembles with driving beat, it was and is an informal, exciting music, slightly disjointed and often mischievous. The same could be said of Condon's autobiography, We Called It Music, a book widely celebrated for capturing the camaraderie of early jazz. Condon's wit was as legendary as the music he boosted. Here is Condon on modern jazz: "The boopers flat their fifths. We consume ours." On Bix Beiderbecke: "The sound came out like a girl saying yes."…


Book cover of New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton's Cultural Critique

Paul Steinbeck Author Of Sound Experiments: The Music of the AACM

From my list on creative music.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a musician and an author. Many of my mentors and collaborators are members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a collective organization of African American composers and performers founded on the South Side of Chicago in 1965. Their farthest-reaching innovation, a form known as “creative music,” transformed the fields of jazz and experimental music by breaking down the barriers that—prior to the advent of the AACM—had separated the disciplines of composition and improvisation. My book Sound Experiments and the other books on the list give readers new insights into the members of the AACM and their groundbreaking music.

Paul's book list on creative music

Paul Steinbeck Why did Paul love this book?

New Musical Figurations is a profile of AACM composer Anthony Braxton. One of the best-known AACM musicians, Braxton is also one of the most influential: while writing hundreds of compositions and touring the world with his many ensembles, he has also found time to teach some of the best composers and improvisers of the twenty-first century, including Taylor Ho Bynum, Mary Halvorson, Steve Lehman, and Tyshawn Sorey. Braxton continues to compose and perform today, and New Musical Figurations explores the ideas and philosophies that motivate his creative practices and draw new generations of listeners to his music.

By Ronald M. Radano,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked New Musical Figurations as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

By relating biography to the cultural and musical contours of contemporary American life, Ronald M. Radano observes jazz practice as part of the complex interweaving of postmodern culture - a culture that has eroded conventional categories defining jazz and the jazz musician. Radano accomplishes all this by analyzing the creative life of Anthony Braxton. Born in 1945, Braxton is not only a virtuoso jazz saxophonist but an innovative theoretician and composer of experimental art music. His refusal to conform to the conventions of official musical culture has helped unhinge the very ideologies on which definitions of "jazz", "black music," "popular…


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