Posted on

In Honor of Duke Ellington: Here Are 15 Great Books About Jazz

Can a sentence swing and a paragraph bop? Is it possible for prose to be as stripped down and cool as a Miles Davis trumpet solo, or a poem to be as incantatory as John Coltrane’s saxophone? Despite all of the musical genres which the United States contributed to contemporary culture, most of them born from the specifically African American experience it should be added, jazz remains in many ways the lodestar of our melodic and rhythmic firmament, the “Classical Music” of America (as complicated as that assertion might be). Read more

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)