Music & Movies

Gary Giddins has been called the best jazz writer in America today (Esquire). Louis Armstrong has been called the most influential jazz musician of the century. Together this auspicious pairing has resulted in Satchmo, one of the most vivid and...

In all my whole career the Brick House was one of the toughest joints I ever played in. It was the honky-tonk where levee workers would congregate every Saturday night and trade with the gals who'd stroll up and down the floor and the bar. Those guys...

A deeply felt portrait of an artist whose influence on a generation of vocalists was profound. -- New York Times Book Review Sarah Vaughan possessed the most spectacular voice in jazz history. In Sassy, Leslie Gourse, the acclaimed biographer of Nat...

San Francisco is probably best known for its hills, ubiquitous fog, dungeness crab and the Golden Gate Bridge. But jazz music's threads are similarly woven into the fabric of the city and its environs. Whether performed in renowned clubs like So...

Shelved for over 20 years, Sam Cooke's Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, stands alongside Otis Redding's Live in Europe and James Brown's Live at the Apollo as one of the finest live soul albums ever made. It also reveals a musical, spiritual,...

This book reassesses Miles Davis' "electric period" and analyzes its continuing influence on contemporary music. While jazz purists often revile this phase - which encompasses the entire second half of his career, from 1967 until his death in 1991 - this...

Full of the sort of 'I was there' stories that enrich the late-night conversations of jazz enthusiasts but rarely end up between the covers. For anyone with an interest in Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and modern jazz, it should be required...

It has been more than thirty-five years since Jimi Hendrix died, but his music and spirit are still very much alive for his fans everywhere. Charles R. Cross vividly recounts the life of Hendrix, from his difficult childhood and adolescence in Seattle...

It has been more than thirty-five years since Jimi Hendrix died, but his music and spirit are still very much alive for his fans everywhere. Charles R. Cross vividly recounts the life of Hendrix, from his difficult childhood and adolescence in Seattle...

This is the most comprehensive and insightful study ever published on the pioneers of electric blues guitar - including the great Chicago, Mississippi Delta, Louisiana, Texas and West Coast bluesmen. Rollin' and Tumblin' offers extensive interviews with...

From renowned diplomat and musician András Simonyi -- whom Stephen Colbert calls "the only ambassador I know who can shred a mean guitar!" -- comes a timely and revealing memoir about growing up behind the Iron Curtain and longing for freedom while...