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.
“…a massive and impressive undertaking… Thoroughly researched, meticulously footnoted, and beautifully crafted,Thelonious Monkpresents the most complete, most revealing portrait ever assembled of the man known as the high priest of bebop.”
—Steve Greenlee
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.
“Superior jazz writing that ranks with that of the best practitioners of the art.” —Ishmael Reed
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.
“Great music lifts us off this plane of existence to a higher level of transcendence and love. Alice Coltrane is a sonic guru who here uses prose to help us understand her journey and show a path to join her there.–Nelson George
Mark Stryker — Jazz from Detroit — New in paperback!
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. Signed copies available in-store!
Art Pepper & Laurie Pepper — Straight Life
One of the great jazz autobiographies—and one of the least sanitized. Pepper’s account of music, addiction, prison, violence, and survival is as raw and unpredictable as the man himself. It’s also a remarkable portrait of the jazz life from inside.
Sonny Rollins — The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins
A very different kind of musician’s autobiography: journals and reflections on practice, music, spirituality, daily life, and the discipline of improvisation. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the mind of one of jazz’s great thinkers as well as players.
Ashley Kahn — The House That Trane Built
The story of Impulse! Records and the extraordinary musical world it created around John Coltrane. Kahn combines label history, interviews, photographs, album covers, and the musicians who made Impulse one of the defining jazz labels of the 1960s.
Sonny Simmons — Better Do It Now Before You Die Later
Simmons was one of the great individualists of the free-jazz movement, playing with Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor and others before largely disappearing from the commercial jazz world. His memoir is the story of a musician who refused to compromise—and paid a price for it.
Wesley Brown — Blue in Green
A novel inspired by the life and music of Miles Davis, Blue in Green moves between jazz history and fiction, using Davis’s music as a starting point for a story about artistic ambition, memory, and the mysterious lives that surround great musicians.
Joseph Jarman — Black Case
Part poetry, part memoir, part meditation, Black Case comes directly out of the world of Joseph Jarman and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. A rare book that feels less like a book about jazz than an artifact of the music itself.
Val Wilmer — As Serious as Your Life
One of the essential books about the avant-garde jazz of the 1960s and ’70s. Wilmer brings together musicians, scenes, politics, race, gender, and the stubborn independence of artists who decided that commercial success wasn’t the point.
Michael C. Heller — Loft Jazz
A history of the New York loft scene of the 1970s, when musicians transformed abandoned spaces into their own venues and communities. It’s a book about experimental music, but also about DIY culture, urban change, and artists creating their own infrastructure.
Richard Havers — Blue Note: Uncompromising Expression
A history of Blue Note Records told partly through the extraordinary visual world surrounding the music. Francis Wolff’s photographs, Reid Miles’s designs, album covers, and the musicians themselves come together in one of the great stories of jazz and graphic design.
Joaquim Paulo — Jazz Covers
A big, beautiful survey of jazz LP art, showing how photography, illustration, typography, and music collided on the record sleeve. For anyone who thinks of jazz album covers as an art form in their own right, this is catnip.
Cisco Bradley – I Hear Freedom: The Great Migration, Free Jazz, and Black Power
Centered on the 60s and 70s free jazz scenes in the industrial midwest: Cleveland and Detroit. I Hear Freedom tells the story of a musical revolution and its connection to the wider Black experience. Figures such as Faruq Z. Bey, Charles Moore, Albert Ayler, Donald Ayler, Charles Taylor all drew on the Great Migration and it shows how free jazz was shaped by mobility, community and the struggle for freedom.
SUN RA: MUSIC & BOOKS FROM ANOTHER PLANET
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. Szwed takes Ra’s cosmic mythology seriously without losing sight of the musician, composer, and cultural thinker underneath it.
Sun Ra — Art on Saturn: The Album Cover Art of Sun Ra’s Saturn Label
Sun Ra’s music came from another planet, and so did some of his album covers. This gorgeous book collects the extraordinary artwork created for his independent Saturn label, revealing how his records became objects of visual art as well as music.
For the Sun Ra obsessive: start here. Then go deeper.
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 edition gathers photographs, album covers, posters, rare ephemera, essays, and an extensively updated discography.
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 backroom gallery. The gallery is our online shop, an evolving ongoing project where we feature local writers, art and photography, and signed collectible books
“Jazz, to me, is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.”— Langston Hughes
Cosmic Music: The Life, Art and Transcence of Alice Coltrane
Sun Ra exhibition posters by Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. (set of two)
Roy DeCarava: The Sound I Saw; Improvisation on a Jazz Theme