Reading
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Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
Robin Kelley
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Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography
Errol Morris
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The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat and Other Clinical Tales
Oliver Sacks
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Not Here, Not Now, Not That!: Protest over Art and Culture in America
Steven J. Tepper
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Graphic Design: Now In Production
Walker Art Center
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The Art Life: On Creativity and Career
Stuart Horodner
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The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists
Seth
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Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Barack Obama
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VW Bus and Pick-Up: Special Models
David Eccles, Michael Steinke
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Soul Mining: A Musical Life
Daniel Lanois
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Category Archives: jazz
Mingus: A Critical Biography
By Brian Priestly (1983)
The British pianist and journalist Brian Priestly has written the first biography of Charles Mingus, and it’s an excellent piece of work. His emphasis tends to be on the music, which he discusses in a lucid and lively manner. But Priestly recounts the life, too, exalting Mingus’s devotion to his art and treating even his most self-destructive fiascoes with even-handed sympathy.
Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings
By Ralph Ellison (2001)
Ellison (1914-94) developed his love of music during his childhood in Oklahoma City, a bastion of Southwestern jazz in the 1920s and 1930s and the home of Jimmy Rushing, Charlie Christian, and the famous Blue Devils. As a young man, he lived with music, listening to it, analyzing it, and mingling with performers in the hopes of becoming one himself (he became a trumpeter). As editor O’Meally makes clear, jazz influenced both his thinking and writing. This fine collection consists mainly of previously uncollected jazz writings, among them “On Bird, Bird-Watching, and Jazz” and “Homage to Duke Ellington on His Birthday.” These interesting and highly personal pieces offer details about a bygone era as well as insights into the formation of Ellison’s mind and the writing of Invisible Man and other fiction in which jazz and its processes figured so strongly.
Mr. Jellyroll
By Alan Lomax (1950)
When it appeared in 1950, this biography of Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton became an instant classic of jazz literature. Jelly Roll’s voice spins out his life in something close to song, each sentence rich with the sound and atmosphere of the period in which Morton, and jazz, exploded on the American and international scene.
Posted in autobiography, biography, history, jazz, music
Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus
By Charles Mingus (1971)
A wild, lyrical, and anguished autobiography, in which Charles Mingus pays short shrift to the facts but plunges to the very bottom of his psyche, coming up for air only when it pleases him. He takes the reader through his childhood in Watts, his musical education by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker, and his prodigious appetites–intellectual, culinary, and sexual. The book is a jumble, but a glorious one, by a certified American genius.
Posted in autobiography, biography, jazz, music
The Birth of Bebop
By Scott DeVeaux (1997)
According to Scott DeVeaux, who has been called the Bud Powell of jazz historians, no single, completely inclusive definition of jazz exists; all that remains to define it is its vigorous evolution. Accordingly, jazz historians are “obsessed with continuity and consensus, even–perhaps especially– when the historical record suggests disruption and dissent.” Bebop, such a self-effacing, clownish term that in no way suggests the complexities of its sounds and rhythms, would become synonymous with a whole new musical sensibility, thought by some to herald nothing less than a revolution. DeVeaux succumbs neither to the evolution nor revolution analysis, but creates an intricate historical weave that sets bebop in the broader social and political contexts.