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'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,…
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.
Fay Weldon’s novels are plotted like my book Secret Lives of Planets: a sequence of chance and disconnected events which nevertheless form a biography. In this novel, Sandra Harris, known to her TV fans as "Starlady Sandra”, an astronomer (famous for her discovery of the new planet Athena), and a “professional searcher after truth”, leaves her inadequate husband and runs off with her jazz-playing lover to the south of France. She is pursued by her husband, her lover’s wife, and paparazzi. “She’s always seeing things“, her friends say: new planets, her Nazi war-criminal eugenicist father, her insane mother, other people. Human lives are a farce, like the accidental events of cosmology.
Starlady Sandra is a woman devoted to her own desires. Discoverer of the planet Athena, television astronomer and wife to a humourless barrister she finds Jack, the sax player, irresistable. Sandra gives up everything to follow Jack and his caravan of musicians to France.
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 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…
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…
Now it can be said: three decades ago, when Vanity Fair assigned me to write a profile of Miles Davis to accompany an excerpt of his about-to-be-published memoir, I presented myself as a jazz expert — when in fact my enthusiasm for the music far outweighed my knowledge. But in the years since I’ve learned a lot about America’s great art form, in part through researching my Frank Sinatra biography — Sinatra worked with many important jazz musicians — and now in working on my latest book, about Miles and two of the geniuses who collaborated with him on his historic album Kind of Blue, the saxophonist John Coltrane and the pianist Bill Evans.
Saxophonist, flutist, and jazz educator Dave Liebman (born in 1946) was the son of two
Jewish Brooklyn schoolteachers, who envisioned the same life for him — all the more so after he contracted polio at age nine. Much to their dismay, Liebman had different ideas.
Because he couldn’t play sports, he nourished a passionate interest in music, first taking
piano lessons, then moving on to his real interest, the saxophone. A strong student with an
interest in history, he might have followed his parents’ wishes and become a teacher — until
the night, at age 16, he took a date to the New York jazz club Birdland and heard the
saxophone giant John Coltrane for the first time, and realized the one and only thing he
wanted to do with his life.
Written in the form of a dialogue with the jazz writer and musician
Lewis Porter, What It Is…
Dave Liebman is one of the leading forces in contemporary jazz. Prominently known for performing with Miles Davis and Elvin Jones, he has exerted considerable influence as a saxophonist, bandleader, composer, author, and educator. In addition to his recent recognition as a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, he has received the Order of Arts and Letters from France and holds an honorary doctorate from the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland. He has mentored many of today's most notable young jazz musicians worldwide and is a prolific writer on jazz.
I have been writing books for a while (don’t make me tell you how long), but mostly novels, and mostly not with dads in them. This finally changed around the time my own lovable, unusual dad died in 2018. I knew I had to write about him and figured I would do this in fiction. But when I really dug into the family secrets my dad kept—and discovered details he didn’t know himself until his last years—I knew I’d need to turn to writing a memoir instead. That got me reading and rereading about all the other vivid, maddening dads who were waiting there on my shelves.
With Laura Warrell’s lyrical book, I discovered a different sort of narcissist dad—the musician kind! Also, the womanizer kind.
I don’t know much about jazz, but you don’t need to know about it to get swept up in Warrell’s story of a trumpeter with the great name Circus Palmer and the female players around him, including his yearning daughter Koko. I admire how Warrell brings you close to Circus and the many women characters: this is no simple story about a man ignoring or abandoning his loved ones.
Circus comes to life, you can almost hear him play, and the novel leaves you with the awareness that a young woman can love and be shaped by a dad, even an absent, maddening one—and even that relation can have a sweet melody.
GMA BUZZ PICK • How do we find belonging when love is unrequited? A "gorgeously written debut" (Celeste Ng, best-selling author of Little Fires Everywhere) filled with jazz and soul, about the perennial temptations of dangerous love, told by the women who love Circus Palmer—trumpet player and old-school ladies’ man—as they ultimately discover the power of their own voices.
“Elegant, unexpected and…unforgettable.” —New York Times Book Review
“A modern masterpiece.” —Jason Reynolds, best-selling author of Look Both Ways
It’s 2013, and Circus Palmer, a forty-year-old Boston-based trumpet player and old-school ladies’ man, lives for his music and refuses to be…
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.
As a scholar as well as performer of the African American creative improvised music usually called jazz, my attunement to this art form resonates with its historico-cultural matrix as much as with the sounds themselves. These books distinguish themselves for being well-researched and rigorous. They are the real deal, doing justice to the heart as well as the intellect of this art form.
This scrupulous 624-page tome elucidates the life and work of the High Priest of Bebop, Saint Thelonious Monk, in amazing detail and exactitude, while remaining supremely engaging and easy to read. The fact that the author developed the book with members of Monk’s family comes through in the authenticity of the narrative.
The image of Thelonious Sphere Monk (1917-1982), with his trademark goatee, dark glasses, and hat, is today a poster-image of coolness just as Che Guevara's face once was an image of rebellion. Jazz fans revere Monk for his ground-breaking compositions and piano playing from the 1950s and 1960s, but to a wider audience he stands for something much bigger: the very idea of native genius; a quirky, absent-minded, unalloyed originality that is the perfect symbol of the indefinable essence of jazz. Monk's creations from the 1950s and 1960s rank among jazz's most beloved classics, yet Kelley shows that the life…
