In honor of Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM), we celebrate the extraordinary history and heritage of jazz, exploring its music, culture, and people who made it thrive. Jazz, despite its distinctly American roots, resonates globally across cultures, languages, and musical traditions. Often described as a musical conversation between band members, with improvisation, rhythm, and swing, jazz is a powerful unifying force that builds bridges, connecting people from all walks of life. Whether it’s the soulful strains of a saxophone in New York or the lively rhythms of a jazz band in Paris, jazz brings us together and celebrates our shared humanity.
We hope that this reading list of 12 stimulating and inspiring books—like the number of keys in an octave—will spark your interest and encourage your participation in this truly original American art form—to read books about it, to study the music, to play and perform, and ultimately to listen to all things jazz.
1. Stomp Off, Let’s Go by Ricky Riccardi
Two-time GRAMMY award-winning author and Louis Armstrong expert Ricky Riccardi tells the enthralling story of the iconic trumpeter’s meteoric rise to fame. Beginning with Louis Armstrong’s youth in New Orleans, Riccardi transports readers through Armstrong’s musical and personal development, including his initial trip to Chicago to join Joe “King” Oliver’s band, his first trip to New York to meet Fletcher Henderson, and his eventual return to Chicago, where he changed the course of music with the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings.
2. SamBop NYC by Marc Gidal
In New York City during the first decades of the new millennium, over two hundred professional musicians play music that combines jazz with Brazilian genres. Blending American and Brazilian music, these musicians continue the legacies of bossa nova, samba jazz, and other styles, while expanding their skills, cultural understandings, and identities.
3. The Classroom Guide to Jazz Improvisation by John McNeil and Ryan Nielsen
This book provides what music educators have sought for decades: an easy, step-by-step guide to teaching jazz improvisation in the music classroom. Offering classroom-tested lesson plans, authors John McNeil and Ryan Nielsen draw on their combined 54 years of teaching experience and extensive work as professional jazz musicians to remove the guesswork and mystique from the teaching process.
4. James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” by Tom Jenks
Tom Jenks’s reading of James Baldwin’s short story follows a scene-by-scene, sometimes line-by-line, discussion of the pattern by which Baldwin indelibly writes “Sonny’s Blues” into the consciousness of readers. It provides ongoing observations of the story’s aesthetics and musical progression, with references to Edward P. Jones, Charlie Parker’s music, Billie Holiday’s “Am I Blue?,” and John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” Jenks pays attention to Baldwin’s oratorical gifts, the biblical references in the story, its time structure, characterizations, dramatic action, and its total effect.
5. Chasin’ the Sound by Brian Levy and Keith Waters
Written for all experience levels, Chasin’ the Sound encourages hands-on learning with activities that highlight the intangible yet key aesthetics of sound, groove, and feel. Studying jazz fundamentals alongside well-known examples of those fundamentals in practice, students and instructors will gain a broader and more meaningful understanding of the art of improvisation.
6. Rhythm Man by Stephanie Stein Crease
In this first comprehensive biography of Chick Webb, author Stephanie Stein Crease traces his story in full, showing how his skills and innovations as a bandleader helped catalyze the music of the Swing Era and the growing big band industry, allowing Webb to become one of the most influential musicians in jazz history. Crease explores Webb’s personal and professional struggles as he rose to the top of the increasingly competitive world of big band jazz.
7. Hearing Double by Brian Kane
When we talk about a jazz “standard” we usually mean one of the many songs that jazz musicians repeatedly play as part of their core repertoire. Unlike classical music, standards are transformed in performance, rearranged, improvised upon, and altered with new chords and melodies. These transformations can be minor or radical revisions. Brian Kane explores what gives a standard its identity by offering a new theory of musical works, addressing the unique challenges presented by standards.
8. The Gerry Mulligan 1950s Quartets by Alyn Shipton
Founded in Los Angeles in 1952, The Gerry Mulligan Quartet was the first small jazz ensemble without a chordal instrument like a piano or guitar. Using original scores and detailed transcriptions of Mulligan’s work, Shipton offers an intimate look at Mulligan’s musical development from the initial quartet with Chet Baker to its successors with Bob Brookmeyer, Jon Eardley, and Art Farmer. Featuring original interviews, and presenting a fresh take on Mulligan’s harmonic creativity, this book traces the ups and downs of his heroin addiction, imprisonment, sobriety, and eventual musical triumph.
9. Rabbit’s Blues by Con Chapman
Johhny Hodges’ celebrated technique and silky tone marked him then, and still today, as one of the most important and influential saxophone players in the history of jazz. In this first ever biography, Rabbit’s Blues details Hodges’ place as one of the premier artists of the alto sax and his role as co-composer with Duke Ellington.
10. Sportin’ Life by Brian Harker
John W. Bubbles was the ultimate song-and-dance man. In this compelling and deeply researched biography, his dramatic story is told for the first time. Coming of age with the great jazz musicians like of Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Ella Fitzgerald, he influenced jazz with his rhythmic ideas. A groundbreaking tap dancer, he provided inspiration to Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, and the Nicholas Brothers. His vaudeville team “Buck and Bubbles” captivated theater audiences for more than thirty years. Most memorably, in the role of Sportin’ Life, he stole the show in the original production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.
11. Instrument of the State by Benjamin J. Harbert
Interweaving oral history and archival research, Benjamin J. Harbert expands on folkloric definitions of “prison music” to show how incarcerated musicians found small but essential freedoms by performing jazz, R&B, country, gospel, rock, and fusion throughout the twentieth century. This book considers the ways in which music manifests among the incarcerated and the prison administration as a lens to better understand state power and the fragments of hope and joy that exist in its wake.
12. The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia
Universally hailed as the most comprehensive and accessible history of the genre of all time, and acclaimed by jazz critics and fans alike, this magnificent work covers the latest developments in the jazz world and revisits virtually every aspect of the music.
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