Music & Movies

This is a great method for any harmonica player to learn blues harmonica basics. An excellent means for expanding performance capabilities and styles, this book and CD set teaches cross harp (second position), note bending, 12-bar shuffle blues with...

As you read, light bulbs switch on: that's what was going when she recorded that; now I can see where he got that sound.--LA Weekly43 Jazz Conversations Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Dizzy Gillespie, Jon Hendricks, Max Roach, Betty Carter, Jackie McLean, Don...

Written by one of jazz journalism's best and most knowledgeable critics, this book explores the full swing spectrum from its origins in the 1920s through its current retro resurgence. Features intriguing capsule biographies of 400 of the best musicians,...

Before Elvis Presley and rock-'n'-roll, another King ruled the roost of American popular music. His name was Benny Goodman and his domain, the gilded age of Swing. Benny's concerts, records, and radio shows catapulted the hot and controversial sounds of...

For a brief time in a Europe threatened and then occupied by Nazi Germany, jazz was heard as ubiquitously as rock ' n' roll is today. In a personal search for the story of that time, Mike Zwerin spent two years traveling across Europe talking with...

Not only biography, but also one of the earliest American attempts to trace the development of jazz.--from the foreword by Dan Morgenstern The first autobiography of a jazz musician, Louis Armstrong's Swing That Music is a milestone in jazz literature...

Book of the Week, Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) Children's Book Award Notable, International Reading Association (IRA) Original Art Show, Society of Illustrators Youth List, Collaborative Summer Library ProgramSearching his Harlem...

Few American superstar stories are richer, wilder, or more excessive than Rick James's. He played in a band with Neil Young, spent years in jail, produced his first album (which was then picked up by Motown) with money from shadowy sources, crossed rock...

Art Pepper (1925-1982) was called the greatest alto saxophonist of the post-Charlie Parker generation. But his autobiography, Straight Life, is much more than a jazz book--it is one of the most explosive, yet one of the most lyrical, of all...

Kim Osorio had a front-row seat for the biggest beefs, battles, and blow-ups in hip-hop. As the first female editor-in-chief of The Source, she had come up. From her corner office, Kim got the goods on hip-hop's hottest names: Jay-Z, Nas, 50 Cent, Lil'...

The ultimate love letter to the world's most magical plant: Weed. Best-selling author, rapper, chef, and television star Action Bronson is a marijuana superhero, and Stoned Beyond Belief is his masterpiece. This is an exploration of every corner of the...