by Wynton Marsalis and Paul Rogers (2005)
Profiles twenty-six of the jazz greats of all time, from Count Basie to Louis Armstrong, through a review of their work, their life stories, and their greatest hits by one of today's top jazz performers. A is for "almighty" Louis Armstrong, whose amazing artistry unfolds in an accumulative poem shaped like the letter he stands for. As for sax master Sonny Rollins, whose "robust style radiates roundness," could there be a better tribute than a poetic rondeau? In an extraordinary feat, Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz composer Wynton Marsalis harmonizes his love and knowledge of jazz's most celebrated artists with an astounding diversity of poetic forms-from simple blues (Count Basie) to a complex pantoum (Charlie Parker), from a tender sonnet (Sarah Vaughan) to a performance poem snapping the rhythms of Art Blakey to life.
J. Patrick Lewis
Presents poems and brief biographical notes about such well-known African Americans as: Arthur Ashe, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Louis Armstrong, Martin Luther King, Jr., "Satchel" Paige, Rosa Parks, Langston Hughes, Jesse Owens, Marian Anderson, Malcolm X, Wilma Rudolph, and Billie Holiday.
Michael R. Strickland
Profiles the lives and work of ten African American poets: Gwendolyn Brooks, Haki R. Madhubuti, Rita Dove, Eloise Greenfield, Langston Hughes, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Nikki Giovanni.
Leslie Gourse
Traces the evolution of the guitar in jazz history and profiles the world's greatest jazz guitarists from the early 1900s to the present.
James L. Dickerson
"Along with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Lillian "Lil" Hardin (1898-1971) was arguably the third most crucial figure in the creation of popular jazz, but today her important contributions are almost entirely unknown." "Born in Memphis, Lil was, by her early twenties, the most sought-after jazz pianist in Chicago, playing first with Freddie Keppard's watershed Creole Jazz Band and later with King Oliver's world-famous Creole Jazz Band. She was already well established in Chicago as a pianist, composer, arranger, and bandleader before she met and married Louis Armstrong in 1924." "Music writer and investigative journalist James L. Dickerson chronicles Lil's many musical achievements, which are all the more remarkable when one considers the patriarchal resistance that women in all professions - jazz included - confronted in twentieth-century America." "But Just for a Thrill, based on original research and interviews, is more than a biography of a jazz pioneer. It is also a story of love found and lost, for though Louis divorced her and remarried, she never forgot him. Lil Hardin Armstrong died of a heart attack while performing during a tribute to Louis in 1971."--BOOK JACKET.