Product Description: A captivating memoir from one of jazz's most beloved practitioners, fourteen-time Grammy winner Paquito D’Rivera’s Letters to Yeyito is a fascinating tour of a life lived in music, and a useful guidebook for aspiring artists everywhere...read more

Product Description: Saxophonist and composer Charles Lloyd has been a strong and important voice in the jazz world since the late 1950s. This freewheeling, fascinating unauthorized biography based on twenty years worth of interviews covers the extreme ups and downs of an uncommonly eventful life, often in the musician s own words...read more

Product Description: With the memory of her gifted husband Gary Windo as muse, Pamela Windo takes us back to the years of music she shared with him in the Sixties and Seventies, reliving the successes and fiascos, the trials of being an artist and mother, the exhilaration of the Hippie and Women’s Lib movements, and the challenges of an open marriage...read more

Longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2014Ben Watt's father was a working-class Glaswegian jazz musician―a politicized left-wing bandleader and composer―whose heyday in the late 1950s took him into the glittering heart of London's West End. His mother, Romany, the daughter of a Methodist parson, was a Shakespearean actress who had triplets in her first marriage before becoming a leading showbiz feature writer and columnist in the '60s and '70s. They were both divorced and from very different backgrounds, and they came together at a fateful New Year's Day party in 1957 like colliding trains.Romany and Tom is Ben Watt's honest, sometimes painful, and often funny portrait of his parents' exceptional lives and marriage, depicted in a personal journey from his own wide-eyed London childhood, through years as an adult with children and a career of his own, to that inevitable point when we must assume responsibility for our own parents in their old age. Spanning several decades―and drawing on a rich seam of family letters, souvenirs, photographs, public archives, and personal memories―it is a vivid story of the postwar years, ambition and stardom, family roots and secrets, big band jazz, depression and drink, life in clubs and nursing homes. It is also about who we are, where we come from, and how we love and live with each other for the long term.

Product Description: During his 13 year career between 1955 and 1968, Paul Chambers was one of the leading double bass players in jazz, performing with a wide variety of artists and a range of the musics sub-genres and recording over 300 LPs for labels such as Blue Note, Riverside, Mercury and Columbia Records...read more

Product Description: Edward "Kid" Ory (1886-1973) was a trombonist, composer, recording artist, and early New Orleans jazz band leader. Creole Trombone tells his story from birth on a rural sugar cane plantation in a French-speaking, ethnically mixed family, to his emergence in New Orleans as the city's hottest band leader...read more

Product Description: Hawaii's legendary jazz musician Gabe Baltazar Jr. has thrilled audiences since the late 1940s with his powerful and passionate playing. In this, the first book on his life and career, Gabe takes readers through the highs, lows, and in-betweens on the long road to becoming one of the very few Asian Americans who has achieved worldwide acclaim as a jazz artist...read more

Product Description: This is an autobiography of Gabe Baltazar, one of the most well-known local jazz musicians whose career expanded to the U.S. Mainland. He played alto saxophone on Stan Kenton Orchestra during 1960s and established himself as one of the few nationally successful Asian American jazz musicians...read more

Essays from Gene Lees jazzletter offer profiles of jazz musicians, and look at the relationships between Black and white jazz musicians

Delves into the jazz musician's career, personality, and associates and includes a listing of his recordings (view table of contents)