Here are 77 books that Trombone Shorty fans have personally recommended if you like
Trombone Shorty.
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I have been writing and illustrating books for fifteen years, and I am passionate about the art of making picture books. I love music and dance too. While making this list, I was amazed by how different visual artists that I admire—and who have very different styles—were able to capture movement, rhythm, and energy. I was also fascinated by how the different authors crafted their stories and yet all of them managed to celebrate Black culture and resilience.
I love Gregory Christie’s artwork. His naïf style illustrations may seem crude and simple at first glance, but I think they are incredibly rhythmic and powerful.
His images pair seamlessly with the book's lyrical text, which depicts the awful hardships that enslaved people in New Orleans endured and the joy they felt on Sundays when they were free to play music, dance, and spend time together in Congo Square.
Winner of a Caldecott Honor and a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2016 A School Library Journal Best Book of 2016: Nonfiction Starred reviews from School Library Journal, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, and The Horn Book Magazine A Junior Library Guild Selection
This poetic, nonfiction story about a little-known piece of African American history captures a human's capacity to find hope and joy in difficult circumstances and demonstrates how New Orleans' Congo Square was truly freedom's heart.
I have been writing and illustrating books for fifteen years, and I am passionate about the art of making picture books. I love music and dance too. While making this list, I was amazed by how different visual artists that I admire—and who have very different styles—were able to capture movement, rhythm, and energy. I was also fascinated by how the different authors crafted their stories and yet all of them managed to celebrate Black culture and resilience.
Christian Robinson is one of my favorite illustrators. His images are very free and childlike while also being incredibly poignant and strongly designed. His artwork pairs beautifully with Hruby Powell’s exuberant text.
The book recounts Josephine Baker’s extraordinary life, from growing up poor in Missouri to becoming a beloved dancer and star in Paris. Both text and images denounce with wit and force the cruel segregation that Black people, including Josephine, experienced in the United States for a large part of the twentieth century.
An emotionally powerful biography told in verse of a dancer, singer, comedienne, and enduring figure - Josephine Baker - from her birth in the slums, her fantastic success, and her fight against racial prejudice.
I have been writing and illustrating books for fifteen years, and I am passionate about the art of making picture books. I love music and dance too. While making this list, I was amazed by how different visual artists that I admire—and who have very different styles—were able to capture movement, rhythm, and energy. I was also fascinated by how the different authors crafted their stories and yet all of them managed to celebrate Black culture and resilience.
The illustrations in this book are fantastic. They are filled with pastel blues, reds, floating circles, and overlapping shapes. They are very atmospheric. It feels like I’m listening to one of John Coltrane’s melodies.
The text is musical, too. The short and lyrical lines focus on the sounds that Coltrane heard as a boy and the events in his early life that inspired him to become a Jazz giant. The book’s ending is great. It is very satisfying.
Young John Coltrane was all ears. And there was a lot to hear growing up in the South in the 1930s: preachers praying, music on the radio, the bustling of the household. These vivid noises shaped John's own sound as a musician. Carole Boston Weatherford and Sean Qualls have composed an amazingly rich hymn to the childhood of jazz legend John Coltrane.
Before John Was a Jazz Giant is a 2009 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Book and a 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
I have been writing and illustrating books for fifteen years, and I am passionate about the art of making picture books. I love music and dance too. While making this list, I was amazed by how different visual artists that I admire—and who have very different styles—were able to capture movement, rhythm, and energy. I was also fascinated by how the different authors crafted their stories and yet all of them managed to celebrate Black culture and resilience.
Brian Pinkney’s scratchboard and oil pastel illustrations are full of energy. They capture Alvin Ailey’s movement and grace. Both the art and the text are thoughtful and very well-researched.
The book shows Alvin Ailey leaving Texas as a young man, discovering dance in LA, and creating the first modern dance company that celebrated the heritage of African-American people. I especially love the illustration of Alvin Ailey arriving in New York with the buildings in the background as if “his dreams soared higher than the tallest skyscrapers.”
The book has a beautiful full-circle moment that shows how Alvin Ailey incorporated gospel traditions from his church in Texas into one of his company’s first suite of dances.
An informative and inspiring biography of Alvin Ailey, the great African-American dancer and choreographer, created by TheNew York Times bestselling and award-winning duo Andrea David Pinkney and Brian Pinkey.
Since he was a young boy in Navasota, Texas, Alvin Ailey loved to stomp his feed and clap his hands to the music of the True Vine Baptist choir. Later, he learned how to dance. He spent some time with the best teachers of the era and eventually started his own modern dance company, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
This is the story of Alvin Ailey's life—a life that left…
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.
Another work that is wonderfully and winningly hard to pin down, Coming Through Slaughter is an imaginative and fragmentary collage of monologue, memoir, interviews, lyrics, photographs, archival material, hospital files—and white space—that builds a novelistic portrait of the mythical dark life and hard times of cornet player Buddy Bolden, one of the originators of jazz in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century. From the little that is known about Bolden and his music, Ondaatje shapes an audacious story that is short, cinematic, dream-like, and devastating, a book that incontrovertibly proved once again to me that there are many, many ways to tell the story of a life.
Discover Michael Ondaatje's debut novel, 'a beautifully detailed story, perhaps the finest jazz novel ever written' Sunday Times
Based on the life of cornet player Buddy Bolden, one of the legendary jazz pioneers of turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans, Coming Through Slaughter is an extraordinary recreation of a remarkable musical life and a tragic conclusion. Through a collage of memoirs, interviews, imaginary conversations and monologues, Ondaatje builds a picture of a man who would work by day at a barber shop and by night unleash his talent to wild audiences who had never experienced such playing. But Buddy was also playing the…
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.
Donald Marquis takes you firmly by the hand and leads you into that Wonderland that was New Orleans from 1877, when Bolden was born; then through the brief but extraordinary rise of Bolden’s personality and the powerful sound of his trumpet echoing through the streets of New Orleans. The author brings out Buddy’s tragic descent into mental illness, his entrance into the Insane Asylum of Louisiana, and his untimely death in 1930 at the young age of thirty-three. The book is a very sober tale of life in those times, it is rooted in the political and artistic history of jazz music and a very touching homage to a ghost. Today there are people wondering if Buddy Bolden really did exist?
The beginnings of jazz and the story of Charles ""Buddy"" Bolden (1877- 1931) are inextricably intertwined. Just after the turn of the century, New Orleanians could often hear Bolden's powerful horn from the city's parks and through dance hall windows. Despite his lack of formal training, his unique style- both musical and personal- made him the first ""king"" of New Orleans jazz and the inspiration for such later jazz greats as King Oliver, Kid Ory, and Louis Armstrong.
For years the legend of Buddy Bolden was overshadowed by myths about his music, his reckless lifestyle, and his mental instability. In…
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.
Quincy Jones knows everybody. He’s worked with everybody. To study the life of Quincy Jones is to study popular music as we know it today. From jazz to soul to R&B to pop, Q has had a hand and a tapping toe in all genres and the lives of those who produced it. His love and passion for music of any genre are infectious. I’ve always been interested in not just the music itself, but in how it’s made, why it’s made, and who makes it, and this autobiography pulls back the curtain on it all.
Musician, composer, producer, arranger, and pioneering entrepreneur Quincy Jones has lived large and worked for five decades alongside the superstars of music and entertainment -- including Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Ray Charles, Will Smith, and dozens of others. Q is his glittering and moving life story, told with the style, passion, and no-holds-barred honesty that are his trademarks.
Quincy Jones grew up poor on the mean streets of Chicago’s South Side, brushing against the law and feeling the pain of his mother’s descent into madness. But when his father moved the family west to Seattle, he…
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…
I've been passionate about music for almost my entire life. Jazz music in particular speaks to me but not just jazz. I love music, full stop. I really discovered jazz when I attended a jazz club workshop in London and there, I had to join in or leave. I chose to join in and since then I have never looked back. I was introduced to more jazz musicians and now write about music for three major columns as well as Readers’ Digest. My Women In Jazz book won several awards. I have been International Editor for the Jazz Journalist Association and had my work commissioned by the Library of Congress.
I loved this book because it spoke directly to me. Jost looks at jazz music and in particular the development of free jazz.
It all fits together and flows so easily. He includes discussions on different musicians, their impact on free jazz music and explains how different areas within America developed their own subgenres of music. This book contains so many ‘aha!’ moments which is why I recommend it.
When originally published in 1974, Ekkehard Jost's Free Jazz was the first examination of the new music of such innovators as Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Jost studied the music (not the lives) of a selection of musicians,black jazz artists who pioneered a new form of African American music,to arrive at the most in-depth look so far at the phenomenon of free jazz. Free jazz is not absolutely free, as Jost is at pains to point out. As each convention of the old music was abrogated, new conventions arose, whether they were rhythmic, melodic, tonal,…
My prime credential for writing these books is my own humanity, as someone who's felt the deep power of music on the human spirit since childhood. The stories I tell in these books are about musicians and artists, people who had a passion for creating something out of thin air with patience and many years of hard work. I highlight their lives to give kids (and adults) examples of passion coupled with persistence because Life is often very challenging.
Winner of the prestigious Schneider Award, Parker's text and artwork celebrate the genius of the great Art Tatum - who just happened to be blind. The words are poignant and effective, but it is Parker's watercolor paintings that glow and amaze with a balance of sophistication and childlike elegance. In short, a master of one medium is being honored by another.
Regardless of whether they’ve heard of jazz or Art Tatum, young readers will appreciate how Parker uses simple, lyrical storytelling and colorful, energetic ink-and-wash illustrations to show the world as young Art Tatum might have seen it. Tatum came from modest beginnings and was nearly blind, but his passion for the piano and his acute memory for any sound that he heard drove him to become a virtuoso who was revered by both classical and jazz pianists alike. Included in the back matter is a biography and bibliography.
