The most recommended books on Charlie Parker (jazz musician)

Connolly weaves taut crime thrillers that I have great trouble putting down once I start reading. Charlie Parker and the rest of the regular cast are beautifully rich characters I care about, which explains the 19 books in this series on my shelf. What sets Connolly apart is an undercurrent of supernatural evil that arcs through these crime stories. In The Black Angel, the shroud that conceals what the reader likely sensed in the early novels is pulled back a little to reveal an underworld of darkness beneath the stories. Charlie Parker is the detective you want on the case when there is more than just a crime and The Black Angel is a milestone in the series.

Pianist Hawes is an under-sung master of the early bebop period. This supremely readable narrative tells the story of how he met and played with Charlie Parker already in his teen years, painting a picture of how jazz musicians lived in the heyday of the bebop revolution. A fun and informative book.  

You could tell me it's just a grocery list, but if it was written by Murakami, I would read it anyway. I have devoured every book he has written.

This one is a series of short stories, and I believe all of them are older. It is a collection of stories he has written earlier in his career. As a musician, I especially identify with Murakami and the way he talks about music in his work. 

The story Charlie Parker Plays the Bossa Nova is enough to have you in laughing and crying at the same time. 

John Connolly is simply a terrific writer. In this Detective Charlie Parker novel, the Maine woods are a character in themselves—sinister, overbearing, and almost certainly harbouring—you guessed it—real evil. Connolly’s Charlie Parker is haunted—literally—and dangerous. He’s a complex and darkly charismatic figure that I find compelling. The Wrath of Angels has at its core the battle between Good and Evil, but it is played out by imperfect characters in a very spooky atmosphere. It has all the ingredients of a horror novel, doesn’t it? But John Connolly manages darker themes believably and again, for me, it mixes genres beautifully—and believe me, that’s not easy.

When I began my book I’d been out of graduate school for 25 years. I read deeply to see what I’d missed and discovered what is now called cultural history. It seems to me that a great deal of it is written to a template rather than directly from the facts as discovered. Even though DeVeaux comes out of the academic world, I get no such sense from Bop. It’s brilliant. Immaculately researched and nicely written, it addresses the extraordinary transition of Black music from entertainment-driven (however artful) to art (however entertaining). It’s an important story, and DeVeaux tells it beautifully.

Crouch (1945-2020) was many things: jazz drummer, poet, philosopher, novelist, biographer, critic. In that last role he was, as the publisher’s notes to this indispensable book of essays on jazz and related matters puts it, “the perennial bull in the china shop of African-American intelligentsia.” Crouch relished controversy — he hated fusion, the popular blend of jazz and rock that came along in the 1970s; he abhorred rap; he even had unkind words to say about Toni Morrison’s Beloved. He was passionately contrarian on racial matters, refusing to hew to any politically correct line. He detested simplistic thinking in any form. Calling Bird, Clint Eastwood’s widely praised 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker “very bad,” Crouch wrote of the “stack of glowing reviews… that reveal the extent to which many who would be sympathetic to Negroes are prone to an unintentional, liberal racism. That racism reduces the complexities of… show more.

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!     

As a jazz critic, I was long struck by the absence of knowledgable (and fun) references to this music in mystery novels, my second love. Then I happened upon a pair of remaindered books by British novelist John Harvey. A blurb referring to his police detective Charlie Resnick's devotion to bebop giants Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk sealed the deal. Harvey doesn't just drop names and titles in Easy Meat, he plays jazz critic himself: "It was a bad sign, Resnick knew, when he played Monk last thing at night, the pianist’s fractured attempts at melody obeying no logic but their own. A big man, as Resnick was big, Monk’s fingers stabbed down at single notes, crushed chords into the beauty of an abstract painting, twisted scaffolding seen in a certain light." 

You might reasonably expect the notorious yet absorbing autobiography of celebrated jazz bassist, composer, and bandleader Charles Mingus to contain a series of names, facts, dates, album titles, compositions, and chronologies. And, indeed, some insight into Mingus’s vibrant music and highly creative process. What you’ll discover, however, is a book that is part visceral, self-mythologising confession memoir and part Dionysian fantasy autofiction. Mingus’s unconventional self-portrait is a spiralling work of impassioned creative writing that, despite its often tiresome literary, personal, and, especially, sexual excesses, somehow manages to say more about the man, his mind, and his times than many a fastidiously detailed and faithful study. Wild, ugly, contradictory, angry, tender, and loving, Beneath the Underdog—like many of my very favourite books—exists entirely on its own terms. 

This book opened up jazz music for me and changed how I viewed it. It is a history book, a storybook, and a narrative on social change, and the author is both knowledgeable and intuitive in his approach.

Insights into nearly all forms of jazz are given, along with their origins. Free jazz and improvised music are explored and in the final pages, Finkelstein gives some wonderful insights into what the future of jazz might look like from the American viewpoint. Masterful writing and a glorious journey into and through the jazz genre and its development.

I felt like Finkelstein was speaking directly to me in some places. An accessible and informative read.