Night Lights Home

· This Week on Night Lights
· Current Audio File
· Description of Program
· Listen live Saturdays 11:10pm
· Host: David Brent Johnson
· Playlists
· Jazz News of Note
· Archives
· Jazz Internet Resources
· Contact Info/Bulletin
· Midwest Jazz Links
· Other WFIU Jazz Programs
· Misc. Jazz/Cultural Links
· The Book Nook

· WFIU Home Page

Left: The legendary Bloomington hotspot where Hoagy Carmichael allegedly wrote "Stardust," seen here in the early 20th-century.

My fascination with jazz-and with its intriguing ties to our social and cultural history-has led me to discover that reading about it can be almost as fun and interesting as listening to it. Almost! Listed below are some of the books that I've found particularly enjoyable and enlightening. Most of them are still in print and readily available through local bookstores or online sites:

Paul Berliner, THINKING IN JAZZ. A well-written investigation into the art of jazz improvisation that incorporates numerous interviews with musicians, the author's own experiences as a jazz trumpeter, and a vast array of jazz and cultural history sources.

Donald Clarke, WISHING ON THE MOON. Clarke's book about Billie Holiday draws heavily upon more than a hundred interviews done by Linda Kuehl in the early 1970s with musicial colleagues and friends of Holiday.

Linda Dahl, STORMY WEATHER. Twenty years after its publication it remains the primary history of women in jazz.

Linda Dahl, MORNING GLORY. Dahl's biography of pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams, whose career is rivaled in duration and breadth only by Miles Davis and Duke Ellington.

Scott DeVeaux, THE BIRTH OF BEBOP. DeVeaux's take on the history of bop combines a smart-but-accessible cultural-studies approach to the history of bop with a musician's love for the music. While acknowledging the tremendous impact of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, he also makes a case for the significance of contributions by artists such as Coleman Hawkins and Howard McGhee.

Ralph Ellison, LIVING WITH MUSIC. A collection of essays on jazz and blues by the author of INVISIBLE MAN.

Lewis Erenberg, SWINGIN' THE DREAM: BIG BAND JAZZ AND THE RE-BIRTH OF AMERICAN CULTURE. Goodman, Ellington, Basie, Miller and more-they're all here in this book about the rise of the big bands in the 1930s and 40s, two of the most volatile decades in the American 20th century, with special attention paid to the impact of the New Deal and World War II.

Will Friedwald, JAZZ SINGING. Friedwald's opinionated, no doubt about it, and I didn't always agree with his assessments (he dismisses Nina Simone in one reductive sentence), but his book serves as a good introductory guide into the vast history of jazz vocals.

Krin Gabbard (ed.), JAZZ AMONG THE DISCOURSES. One of the first anthologies of cultural-studies writing about jazz.

Krin Gabbard, JAMMIN' AT THE MARGINS. Gabbard's study of how jazz has been portrayed in the movies.

James Gavin, DEEP IN A DREAM: THE LONG NIGHT OF CHET BAKER. A harrowing biography of 1950s West-Coast-cool icon Chet Baker, whose descent into drugs laid waste to his talent and good looks.

Ted Gioia, THE HISTORY OF JAZZ. Such ambitious undertakings inevitably provoke charges of omission, misrepresentation, etc., but Gioia's is a good, solid, comprehensive history. I re-read much of it recently, and it sent me running back enthusiastically to some recordings I hadn't listened to in a long time!

Ted Gioia, WEST COAST JAZZ. Definitive book on the time (1950s/early 60s), place (not just California!) and music.

Ira Gitler, FROM SWING TO BOP. Gitler interviewed dozens of musicians for this book, which captures the jazz world during one of its most revolutionary and transitional periods.

Robert Gottlieb (ed.), READING JAZZ. An omnibus of jazz reportage, essays, and other writings that includes remarkable pieces such as "The House in the Heart," Bobby Scott's remembrance of his experiences with Lester Young in the 1950s.

Isoardi, Steven (ed.), CENTRAL AVENUE SOUNDS. A remarkable oral memoir of Los Angeles' thriving jazz district in the 1940s and 50s, when musicians such as Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray dominated the scene. It also includes the story of the battle to integrate the local white and black musician unions.

Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), BLUES PEOPLE. Baraka's take on the influence of African-Americans not just on jazz and blues, but on American culture in general.

Rick Kennedy, JELLY ROLL, BIX AND HOAGY. In-depth history of Richmond, Indiana's Gennett Records label.

Barry Kernfeld, WHAT TO LISTEN FOR IN JAZZ. A great introduction that enhances listening pleasure (pardon the racy description) through its revelation of the structures, styles, basic elements, and techniques that jazz composers and musicians use. It also comes with a CD chockfull of musical examples from legendary jazz recordings.

Bill Kirchner (ed.), THE OXFORD COMPANION TO JAZZ. Nearly every style, genre, and subject that you can think of when it comes to jazz is addressed in this 800-page book, by a wide variety of scholars and musicians.

Neil Leonard, JAZZ: MYTH AND RELIGION. Engrossing look at the rituals and mythologies that have evolved around jazz, as well as the fervent religiosity it has often inspired.

John Litweiler, THE FREEDOM PRINCIPLE: JAZZ AFTER 1958. One of the better books on free jazz in the 1960s, with chapter biographies and analysis. (For a more technical approach that's well worth reading, check out Eberhard Jost's FREE JAZZ.)

Allen Lowe, THAT DEVILIN' TUNE. Hard to find, but worth it-an idiosyncratic examination of jazz and American music from 1900 to 1950.

Robert O'Meally (ed.), THE JAZZ CADENCE OF AMERICAN CULTURE. One of the few jazz books I've found that offers both the neo-trad point-of-view (Wynton Marsalis, Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch) and others (especially Scott DeVeaux's breakthrough essay "Constructing the Jazz Canon"). The essays cover jazz's relationship to art, film, dance, architecture, and even athletics.

Art and Laurie Pepper, STRAIGHT LIFE. Whew. If Pepper hadn't been a great saxophonist, he could've been a great novelist. This autobiography holds little, if anything, back as it recounts Pepper's time with the big bands in the 1940s, his heroin-ridden 1950s, his long, brutal prison stretch in the 1960s, and his amazing comeback in the 1970s.

Eric Porter, WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED JAZZ? Porter's historical project: to better understand how African-American musicians sought to shape and define jazz throughout the 20th century.

Lewis Porter, JOHN COLTRANE. Porter's biography falls short of being definitive-not nearly enough about the monumental 1961 Village Vanguard recordings with Eric Dolphy, or the explosive year of 1965-but as Coltrane books go, it's the best one written & researched so far.

David Rosenthal, HARD BOP. Good overview of the 1950s/60s Art Blakey-inspired school that brought musicians such as Lee Morgan and Jackie McLean to prominence.

Duncan Schiedt, THE JAZZ STATE OF INDIANA. The most authoritative text written on the subject to date, written by a renowned jazz photographer and longtime Indiana resident.

Gunther Schuller, EARLY JAZZ and THE SWING ERA. Two seminal books on jazz from 1915-1930 and 1930-1945, respectively. A fair amount of musical/technical analysis here, but Schuller almost always couches it in an accessible manner, and he makes some surprising and often convincing arguments on behalf of certain artists and bands.

A.B. Spellman, FOUR JAZZ LIVES. Also known as BLACK MUSIC: FOUR LIVES and FOUR LIVES IN THE BEBOP BUSINESS. A book built around four extensive interviews with Jackie McLean, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Herbie Nichols, with a great deal of sympathy for the artistic and racial struggles of all four artists.

Richard Sudhalter, STARDUST MELODY. A fine & sensitively-written biography of Bloomington's favorite son that does much to situate his place in musical history.

Richard Sudhalter, LOST CHORDS. A controversial book that makes the case that white musicians have been undercredited and underrepresented in most jazz histories. Whether they agree with Sudhalter or not, early-jazz and swing fans will find many names and stories well worth learning about here.

Tapscott, Horace, SONGS OF THE UNSUNG. Autobiography of an underground Los Angeles pianist and composer committed to a compelling individualistic music vision as well as community and social justice values.

Sherri Tucker, SWING SHIFT. A cultural-studies look at women in 1930s and 1940s big-band jazz.

Martin Williams, THE JAZZ TRADITION. A compelling introduction to many of the musicians-Eric Dolphy, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, and others-who dominated 20th-century American jazz.

Valerie Wilmer, AS SERIOUS AS YOUR LIFE. Interviews, personal anecdotes, and much else about the free-jazz musicians of the 1960s.


Other books of interest:

William Burroughs, JUNKY. Burroughs' quasi-noir novel of 1940s New York's bohemian drug culture.

David Halberstam, THE FIFTIES. If it's Halberstam, it's a comprehensive tome. A good overview of a decade much more complex than it's usually portrayed.

Brenda Knight, WOMEN OF THE BEAT GENERATION. Profiles, photos, and original writings of 40 women who helped shape a cultural revolution.

Woody Haut, PULP CULTURE: HARDBOILED FICTION AND THE COLD WAR. Haut positions the pulp crime writers of the 1940s, 50s and 60s as unconscious, and sometimes quite conscious, social and political critics.

Norman Mailer, ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF. Essays, short stories, criticism, abandoned novels. Proceed with caution. As a cultural and intellectual document of the 1950s, worth paging through.

James Naremore, MORE THAN NIGHT. Excellent study of noir films by an avid jazz fan and Indiana University professor.

Frank O'Hara, ART CHRONICLES 1954-1966. Musings from a man better known for his poetry, but whose day job was curating for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Comments or additional suggestions are welcome at johnsond@indiana.edu.