READING JAZZ
A Book Beat Bibliography for the Detroit Jazz Festival
This weekend Detroit hosts the world’s largest free jazz festival, bringing four days of music to Hart Plaza and the Gretchen C. Valade Jazz Center.
Here’s a selection from the shelves at Book Beat: essential biographies and autobiographies, Detroit jazz history, a journey into Sun Ra’s universe, and a few newer books and rarities from the Book Beat Backroom Gallery. Links to books are from our affiliate page on Bookshop.org, or to our website.
A list for the jazz curious, the jazz obsessive, and anyone who plans on spending the weekend downtown.
Charles Mingus — Beneath the Underdog
Mingus’s autobiography is less a conventional account of a musician’s life than a wild trip through his imagination, anger, sexuality, spirituality, and memories of the jazz world. Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie appear along the way, but the real subject is Mingus himself: complicated, funny, furious, and impossible to contain.
Robin D. G. Kelley — Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
The definitive Monk biography, and one of the great books about a jazz musician. Kelley spent fourteen years researching Monk’s life, digging through family archives and interviewing those who knew him, to get beyond the familiar mythology of the eccentric genius and reveal the witty, complicated, fiercely independent artist underneath.
Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe — Miles: The Autobiography
Miles tells it like Miles tells it—bluntly, profanely and without much interest in pleasing anybody. His story runs from bebop through Kind of Blue and the electric years, with Charlie Parker, Monk, Coltrane, Mingus and the rest of the twentieth-century jazz landscape passing through his orbit.
Alice Coltrane — Monument Eternal
Originally published in 1977 and recently reissued, this short, extraordinary book moves beyond biography into spiritual autobiography. It offers a glimpse into Alice Coltrane’s inner world—from her beginnings as a Detroit church musician to her life as a composer, improviser and spiritual teacher.
John Szwed — Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra
John Szwed’s acclaimed biography follows Sun Ra from his early years as a Chicago pianist through the formation of the Arkestra and his transformation into one of the most radical figures in twentieth-century music. It manages to take Ra’s cosmic mythology seriously without losing sight of the musician, composer, and cultural thinker underneath it.
Hartmut Geerken & Chris Trent — Omniverse Sun Ra
Part discography, part visual archive, part cosmic field guide, Omniverse Sun Ra is the book for anyone who wants to disappear completely down the Sun Ra rabbit hole. The newly revised third edition gathers photographs, album covers, posters, rare ephemera, essays, and an extensively updated discography into a magnificent volume.
Mark Stryker — Jazz from Detroit
If we’re celebrating jazz in Detroit, this one belongs near the front of the stack. Stryker traces Detroit’s role in modern jazz through generations of musicians, connecting the players to the city and to one another—and showing how deeply jazz is woven into Detroit’s history.
FROM THE BOOK BEAT BACKROOM
Alongside these books, we’ve pulled a selection of hard-to-find jazz books, photography, catalogs, and other oddities from the Book Beat Backroom Gallery. Some are old friends, some are books you probably won’t encounter every day, and a few are simply things we think jazz people will find irresistible.
Jazz is music, but it has always been more than music. These are some of the books that help tell the story.
Roy DeCarava: The Sound I Saw; Improvisation on a Jazz Theme