Recommended Jazz Books

The first full biography of legendary jazz musician Thelonious Monk, written by a brilliant historian, with full access to the family's archives and with dozens of interviews. Now updated with an afterword for Monk’s 2017 centennial. Thelonious Monk is the critically acclaimed, gripping saga of an artist’s struggle to “make it” without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the twentieth century.

Fifth Edition, Paperback. Exploring chords, scales, voicings, progressions, style, function, and improvisation, this is a comprehensive approach for serious students of jazz piano. In this clearly written instructional text, Charles Austin draws on nearly fifty years of experience as a professional jazz pianist and thirty as a college instructor guiding hundreds of students in the fundamentals of jazz piano. Of special interest is the in-depth treatment of source scales and harmonic function, invaluable to both students and professionals. Interspersed throughout with exercises and practice suggestions, the book is a complete guide to learning jazz piano and harmony for intermediate to advanced students. It is also a comprehensive resource for professionals, with thorough presentations of chords, source scales, slash chords, harmonic function, polychords, and more.

The Music Lesson is the story of a struggling young musician who wanted music to be his life, and who wanted his life to be great. Then, from nowhere it seemed, a teacher arrived. Part musical genius, part philosopher, part eccentric wise man, the teacher would guide the young musician on a spiritual journey, and teach him that the gifts we get from music mirror those from life, and every movement, phrase, and chord has its own meaning...All you have to do is find the song inside.

Culled from the DownBeat archives includes in-depth interviews with literally every great jazz artist and personality that ever lived! Features classic photos and magazine covers from DownBeat 's vast archives. In honor of its 75th anniversary, DownBeat 's editors have brought together in this one volume the best interviews, insights, and photographs from the illustrious history of the world's top jazz magazine, DownBeat . This anthology includes the greatest of DownBeat 's Jazz Hall of Famers: from early legends like Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman; to bebop heroes like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, and Miles Davis; to truly unique voices like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Thelonious Monk, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk; to the pioneers of the electric scene like Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Pat Metheny, and Joe Zawinul. The Great Jazz Interviews delivers the legends of jazz, talking about America's music and America itself, in their own words.

John Coltrane was a key figure in jazz, a pioneer in world music, and an intensely emotional force whose following continues to grow.
This new biography, the first by a professional jazz scholar and performer, presents a huge amount of never-before-published material, including interviews with Coltrane, photos, genealogical documents, and innovative musical analysis that offers a fresh view of Coltrane's genius.

A marvelously balanced yet passionate history of a protean cultural form. Not only is the book encyclopedic in the breadth of its coverage, but it has a thesis — or, more accurately, a set of interlocking theses — about how the music has developed.

(Fake Book). Perfect Binding Edition.This unprecedented, revolutionary collection of jazz standards progressions includes all harmonic progressions with full harmonic analysis, chords, chord-scales and arrows & brackets analysis.Every Jazz Standard analysis was hand-made by well-versed jazz musicians. Every function, chord-scale, modulation and pivot-chord was carefully chosen to create the best possible harmonic interpretation of the progression.All double-page songs are presented side-by-side, so no flipping through pages is necessary.Available for Concert, Bb & Eb Instruments.Volume I has 291 songs including All Blues * Autumn Leaves * All of Me * Blue Trane * Body and Soul * Desafinado * Donna Lee * Girl From Ipanema * It Don’t Mean a Thing * Like Someone in Love * Misty * Moment’s Notice * My Favorite Things * Prelude to a Kiss * Stella By Starlight * Wave * and hundreds more!

From his beginnings as a child prodigy to his early classic Blue Note recordings; from his work in Miles Davis’s second great quintet to his innovations as the leader of his own groundbreaking sextet; from era-defining classic albums like Head Hunters and River: The Joni Letters to his collaborations with artists like Wayne Shorter and Stevie Wonder, Hancock reveals the methods behind his ever-evolving musical genius. He discusses his influences, his happy marriage, and how his practice of Buddhism has inspired him both creatively and personally. Honest, enlightening, and as electrifyingly vital as its author, this is an invaluable contribution to jazz literature and an intimate, insightful portrait of a creative life.

The great improvisational American jazz musicians of the mid-20th century inspired a generation of photographers to develop a looser, moodier style of visual expression. That evocative approach is on striking display in The Jazz Image. Covering six decades of performers from Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington to John Coltrane and Miles Davis. This unique collection is as much a comprehensive catalogue of jazz greats as it is a salute to the photographers who captured them. No mean jazz photographer himself--see his Images of Jazz (1996)--Tanner generously shares space with his peers in this album for which he wrote the historical preface, explaining why jazz photography is an after-1930 development, and selected the pictures. If there are more Tanner photos here than anyone else's, they don't upstage anyone else's, either.

Miles: The Autobiography, like Miles himself, holds nothing back. He speaks frankly and openly about his drug problem and how he overcame it. He condemns the racism he encountered in the music business and in American society generally.
And he discusses the women in his life. But above all, Miles talks about music and musicians, including the legends he has played with over the years: Bird, Dizzy, Monk, Trane, Mingus, and many others.

An anecdotal portrait of the jazz saxophonist begins with the transport of his great-great-grandmother as a slave from Guinea to Kentucky in the early nineteenth century and continues through the donation of his instrument to the Institute of Jazz Studies after his death. Original. Ben Webster was one of the great tenor sax players in the history of jazz. Best known for his productive two-year stint with Duke Ellington (1940-42), Webster was an original and distinctive soloist whose greatest strength was as a ballad player. After he leaving Ellington, he embarked on a thirty-year solo career, but his Swing-oriented style fell from favor by the late '40's. He recorded frequently in the Fifties and Sixties, but he struggled to match his earlier achievements. He left the U.S. and settled in Europe in the Sixties, and he died there in 1973.

Born in 1901 to the sixteen-year-old daughter of a slave, he came of age among the prostitutes, pimps, and rag-and-bone merchants of New Orleans. He married four times and enjoyed countless romantic involvements in and around his marriages. A believer in marijuana for the head and laxatives for the bowels, he was also a prolific diarist and correspondent, a devoted friend to celebrities from Bing Crosby to Ella Fitzgerald, a perceptive social observer, and, in his later years, an international goodwill ambassador.

“This book is the purest of dynamite. Like the autobiographies of Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday and like A. B. Spellman's Four Lives in the Bebop Business, it says more about the American psyche in general and black survival in particular than the sociologists and psychologists ever can in their stiff, soulless vocabularies.... Somber, comic, disturbing, boastful, confessional, sentimental, contradictory, poetic, irascible, impish...lyrical, nasty, angelic, reflective...expressionistic, picaresque, jive...this is a powerful book.”

Finally: the ultimate revised, updated and expanded edition Chet Baker was a star at 23 years old, winning the polls of America’s leading magazines. But much of his later life was overshadowed by his drug use and problems with the law. ‘Chet Baker / His life and music’ was Baker’s first biography, published a year after Baker’s passing in 1988. It was available in five languages. Now finally, here is Jeroen de Valk’s thoroughly updated and expanded edition. De Valk spoke to Baker himself, his friends and colleagues, the police inspector who investigated his death and many others. He read virtually every relevant word that was ever published about Chet and listened to every recording; issued or unissued. The result of all this is a book which clears up quite a few misunderstandings. For Chet was not the ‘washed-up’ musician as portrayed in the ‘documentary’ Let’s Get Lost. His death was not thát mysterious. According to De Valk, Chet was first of all an incredible improviser; someone who could invent endless streams of melody.

Coltrane was a gracious and conscientious interviewee. His responses were thoughtful and measured; he rarely said anything negative about others (though he could be highly self-critical). He freely gave credit to those who influenced and inspired him. Interviewer after interviewer noted how different Coltrane seemed from his music--this quiet man whose music was so volcanic. Coltrane on Coltrane includes every known Coltrane interview, many in new transcriptions, and several previously unpublished; articles, reminiscences, and liner notes that rely on interviews; and some of Coltrane’s personal writings and correspondence. John Coltrane never wrote an autobiography. This book is as close to one as possible.

This is a unique book, in which a great artist offers his personal thoughts, both on jazz and on how to live a better, more original, productive, and meaningful life. To a Young Jazz Musician is sure to be treasured by readers young and old, musicians, lovers of music, and anyone interested in being mentored by one of America’s most influential, generous, and talented artists.

Bird Lives! - The High Life And Hard Times Of Charlie (Yardbird) Parker is the vivid biography of a musical genius and a symbol of an age. He was the very embodiment of jazz. This work on Charlie Bird Parker offers a picture of not only of the saxophonist-composer as an artist and as a human being, but also of zeitgeist and the musical/social setting that produced him. It shows his complex personality; his great appetites; the extent of his influence; and his work.

Art Tatum defined the limits of the possible in jazz piano. Gunther Schuller called Tatum's playing "a marvel of perfection.... His deep-in-the-keys full piano sonority, the tone and touch control in pyrotechnical passages...are miracles of performance." Whitney Balliett wrote "no pianist has ever hit notes more beautifully. Each one--no matter how fast the tempo--was light and complete and resonant, like the letters on a finely printed page." His famous runs have been compared to the arc left against the night sky by a Fourth-of-July sparkler. And to have heard him play, one musician said, "was as awe-inspiring as to have seen the Grand Canyon or Halley's Comet." Now, in Too Marvelous For Words, James Lester provides the first full-length biography of the greatest virtuoso performer in the history of jazz. Before this volume, little was known about Tatum, even among jazz afficionados. What were his origins, who taught him and who provided early pianistic influences, how did he break into the jazz field, what role did he play in the development of other jazz players, and what was he like when he wasn't playing?

A Grammy winner and pioneer of multi-track jazz recording, Bill Evans was the pianist on Miles Davis' classic Kind of Blue album and a key figure in the development of modern jazz piano. This new Backbeat book details his wide-ranging and absorbing career, from freelance work in the 1950s, through his groundbreaking trios and solo releases, to his relationships with various record labels, to the intense final phase before his death in 1980. Printed on top-quality stock, the book includes fantastic full-page photos throughout, and a special color section.

How Jazz Can Change Your Life - Wynton Marsalis. In this beautiful book, Pulitzer Prize—winning musician and composer Wynton Marsalis draws upon lessons he’s learned from a lifetime in jazz–lessons that can help us all move to higher ground. With wit and candor he demystifies the music that is the birthright of every American and demonstrates how a real understanding of the central idea of jazz–the unique balance between self-expression and sacrifice for the common good exemplified on the bandstand–can enrich every aspect of our lives, from the bedroom to the boardroom, from the schoolroom to City Hall.