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If not for a stint in reform school, young Louis Armstrong might never have become a musician. It was a teacher at the Colored Waifs Home who gave him a cornet, promoted him to band leader, and saw talent in the tough kid from the even tougher New Orleans neighborhood called Storyville. But it was Louis Armstrong's own passion and genius that pushed jazz into new and exciting realms with his amazing, improvisational trumpet playing. His seventy-year...
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His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of "bebop" and establishing Monk as one of America's greatest composers. Yet throughout much of his life, his musical contribution took a backseat to tales of his reputed behavior. Writers tended to obsess over Monk's hats or his proclivity to dance on stage. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental,...
5) Small worlds
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"Set over the course of three summers, Small Worlds follows Stephen, a first-generation Londoner born to Ghanaian immigrant parents, brother to Ray, and best friend to Adeline. On the cusp of big life changes, Stephen feels pressured to follow a certain track-a university degree, a move out of home-but when he decides instead to follow his first love, music, his world and family fracture in ways he didn't foresee. Now Stephen must find a path and...
6) Dizzy
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An acclaimed biographer for children, Jonah Winter brings historical figures to life for young listeners. Here he turns his talents to jazz legend John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie. Born into poverty and the victim of vicious parental abuses, Dizzy received a trumpet one day and it changed his life forever. Dizzy follows Gillespie's journey from rural South Carolina to New York City-straight into the burgeoning jazz scene he soon immersed himself in.
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Boomtown Chicago, 1920sa world of gangsters, musicians, and clubs. Young Benny Lehrman, born into a Jewish hat-making family, is expected to take over his fathers business, but his true passion is pianoespecially jazz. After dark, he sneaks down to the South Side to hear the bands play. One night he is asked to sit in with a group. His playing is first-rate. The trumpeter, a black man named Napoleon, becomes Bennys friend and musical collaborator....
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An intimate exploration into the musical genius of fifteen living jazz legends, from the longtime New York Times jazz critic
Jazz is conducted almost wordlessly: John Coltrane rarely told his quartet what to do, and Miles Davis famously gave his group only the barest instructions before recording his masterpiece "Kind of Blue." Musicians are often loath to discuss their craft for fear of destroying its improvisational essence, rendering jazz among...
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"A tour de force. . . . Crouch has given us a bone-deep understanding of Parker's music and the world that produced it. In his pages, Bird still lives." - Washington Post
A stunning portrait of Charlie Parker, one of the most talented and influential musicians of the twentieth century, from Stanley Crouch, one of the foremost authorities on jazz and culture in America.
Throughout his life, Charlie Parker personified the tortured American artist:...
10) Soul
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Disney/Pixar
Pub. Date
[2021]
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English
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Joe Gardner is a middle-school band teacher who gets the chance of a lifetime to play at the best jazz club in town. A misstep takes him from New York City to The Great Before, a fantastical place where new souls get their personalities before going to Earth. Determined to return to his life, Joe teams up with a precocious soul, 22, who has never understood the appeal of the human life. As Joe tries to show 22 what's great about life, he may discover...
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When Hannah Swensen hears that the Cinnamon Roll Six jazz band will be playing at a festival in Lake Eden, Minnesota, she bakes up a supply of their namesake confections to welcome them. But tragedy strikes when their tour bus overturns on its way into town. And keyboard player Buddy Neiman's minor injuries turn deadly serious when someone plunges surgical scissors into his chest...Turns out, Buddy Neiman isn't the victim's real name. In fact, no...
12) A cold heart
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Alex Delaware novels volume 17
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English
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BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Jonathan Kellerman's Guilt.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
LAPD homicide detective Milo Sturgis summons his friend psychologist-sleuth Alex Delaware to a trendy gallery where a promising young artist has been brutally garroted on the night of her first major showing. The details of the murder scene immediately suggest to Alex not an impulsive crime of passion but...
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
LAPD homicide detective Milo Sturgis summons his friend psychologist-sleuth Alex Delaware to a trendy gallery where a promising young artist has been brutally garroted on the night of her first major showing. The details of the murder scene immediately suggest to Alex not an impulsive crime of passion but...
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From his emergence in the 1950s as an uncannily beautiful young Oklahoman who became the prince of cool jazz seemingly overnight to his violent, drug-related death in Amsterdam in 1988, Chet Baker lived a life that has become an American myth. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and previously untapped sources, this first major biography of one of the most romanticized icons in jazz gives a thrilling account of the trumpeter's dark journey. Author James...
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""Nicole Mones conjures up the jazz-filled, complex, turbulent world of Shanghai just before World War II. A rich and thoroughly captivating read."--Gail Tsukiyama, author of The Samurai's Garden Sailing to Shanghai in 1936 to lead a black jazz orchestra, Thomas Greene goes from being flat broke in segregated Baltimore to living in a mansion with servants of his own, and from the classical piano pieces he was trained to play to the toe-tapping swing...
15) Bud, not Buddy
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Ten-year-old Bud, a motherless boy living in Flint, Michigan, during the Great Depression, escapes a bad foster home and sets out in search of the man he believes to be his father--the renowned bandleader, H.E. Calloway of Grand Rapids.
It's 1936, in Flint, Michigan. Times may be hard, and ten-year-old Bud may be a motherless boy on the run, but Bud's got a few things going for him: 1. He has his own suitcase full of special things. 2. He's the author...
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Lee & Low Books
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
English
Description
"A biography of African American musician Melba Doretta Liston, a virtuoso musician who played the trombone and composed and arranged music for many of the great jazz musicians of the twentieth century. Includes afterword, discography, and sources"--
17) Django
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English
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Born into a travelling gypsy family, young Django Reinhardt taught himself guitar at an early age. He was soon acclaimed as the "Gypsy Genius" and "Prodigy Boy," but one day his world changed completely when a fire claimed the use of his fretting hand. Folks said Django would never play again, but with passion and perserverance he was soon setting the world's concert stages ablaze. Bonnie Christensen's gorgeous oil paintings and jazzy, syncopated...
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"Sonny Rollins is one of the most prolific sax players in the history of jazz, but in 1959, at the height of his career, he vanished from the scene. His return to music was an interesting journey - with a long detour on the Williamsburg Bridge. Too loud to practice in his apartment, Rollins played on the New York City landmark for two years among the cacophony of the traffic and the stares of bystanders. Then in 1962, Rollins went back to the studio...
19) Half-blood blues
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English
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"Berlin, 1939. The Hot-Time Swingers, a popular German American jazz band, have been forbidden to play live because the Nazis have banned their 'degenerate music.' After escaping to Paris, where they meet Louis Armstrong, the band's brilliant young trumpet-player, Hieronymus Falk, is arrested in a café by the Gestapo. It is June 1940. He is never heard from again. He is twenty years old, a German citizen. And he is black. Berlin, 1992. Falk, now...
20) The dead play on
Author
Series
Cafferty and Quinn novels volume 3
Language
English
Description
Musicians are being murdered in New Orleans. But Arnie Watson apparently died by his own hand. When Tyler Anderson plays the saxophone he inherited from Arnie, a soldier and musician who died soon after his return, he believes he sees visions of his friend's life -- and death. He becomes convinced Arnie was murdered and that the instrument had something to do with whatever happened, and with whatever's happening all over the city. Tyler knows his...
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