In our upcoming May/June issue, we review two nonfiction books starring jazz greats from the Big Easy: How Jelly Roll Morton Invented Jazz and Trombone Shorty.
The annual — and beloved — New Orleans Jazz Festival starts today. If (like me) you can’t make it, put on some jazz and check out How Jelly Roll Morton Invented Jazz, Trombone Shorty, or one of these other toe-tapping picture books recommended by The Horn Book Magazine:
Fiction
The imaginary octet of Miles Davis, Max Roach, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Stanley Clarke, Ella Fitzgerald, and an unnamed guitarist take their places on stage in Leo and Diane Dillon’s Jazz on a Saturday Night. Music, in the form of patterns resembling African textile art, pours out of the instrumentalists and singer. The authors’ note provides a brief biography of each musician. A CD features the text set to music. (Scholastic/Blue Sky, 2007)
Bird & Diz author Gary Golio distills the “be-bop-a-skoodley” friendship between musical legends John “Dizzy” Gillespie and Charlie “Bird” Parker into a single jam session. Ed Young illustrates the encounter with a single uninterrupted accordion-folded frieze. Abstracted musical interpretation — with black spirals and melodious blues and greens clashing against fluorescent oranges and pinks, building to a clamorous climax — is grounded by portraits of Bird and Diz. The resulting combination of words and imagery introduces the unique players and captures the controlled, explosive frenzy of their musical collaboration. (Candlewick, 5–8 years)
When Daddy puts a record on the turntable in Jazz Baby, everyone gets into the sound, including the baby in his crib. The rhythmic text continues with everyone singing and dancing until finally “snoozy-woozy baby” drops off to sleep. The vitality comes through both in Lisa Wheeler’s lively text and R. Gregory Christie’s jazzy, brightly colored gouache paintings, their curves and angles highlighted in black ink. (Harcourt, 2007)
Nonfiction
Benny Goodman grew up in Chicago, a working-class Jewish boy; Teddy Wilson lived in Tuskegee, Alabama, a middle-class African American boy. Lesa Cline-Ransome’s Benny Goodman & Teddy Wilson: Taking the Stage as the First Black-and-White Jazz Band in History recounts the story of how the two jazz musicians met and formed the Benny Goodman Trio (the “first interracial band to perform publicly”) in short bursts of text, almost like jazz riffs. James E. Ransome’s pencil and watercolor illustrations capture distinctive moments. (Holiday, 2014)
Gary Golio’s Spirit Seeker: John Coltrane’s Musical Journey, a picture-book biography best suited to older children and young teens, successfully describes Coltrane’s music and what made it distinctive. The sophisticated illustrations by Rudy Gutierrez show faces with almost photographic realism, while the lines depicting the background scenes are intentionally distorted and abstracted into swirling shapes. Thus the art ingeniously gets across the story’s intangibles: Coltrane’s pain, his drug-addled mind, his spirituality, and his music. (Clarion, 2012)
Nearly blind from birth, young Art spends most of his time at the piano. In Piano Starts Here: The Young Art Tatum, author-illustrator Robert Andrew Parker pulls off a book’s tricky present-tense narration by infusing it with a brisk and varied jazz-like rhythm, subtle internal rhyme, and well-placed word repetition. The pen and watercolor illustrations are masterfully executed, showing deeply saturated colors in the backgrounds and people drawn with great gestural energy. (Schwartz & Wade, 2008)
Jazz pioneer and free-spirited iconoclast Sun Ra (he believed he came from Saturn) gets a portrait as bemusing as the man himself in fantastical tribute The Cosmobiography of Sun Ra: The Sound of Joy Is Enlightening. Author-illustrator Chris Raschka’s trademark loose gestural style is effective in reflecting his subject’s untethered spirit and impenetrable persona. The images themselves are dense and dynamic, full of brilliant color and heavy black. List of selected recordings appended. (Candlewick, 2014)
Seven-year-old Melba Liston chose to play the trombone, an unconventional choice for a girl. By seventeen, she was touring with the greats, including Dizzy Gillespie and Quincy Jones, but — as a female African American musician traveling through the South — faced many challenges. Katheryn Russell-Brown’s text in biography Little Melba and Her Big Trombone is as smooth and stimulating as a Liston trombone solo. Frank Morrison’s elongated, angular oil paintings perfectly convey the jazz scene. (Lee, 2014)
In Carole Boston Weatherford’s Before John Was a Jazz Giant: A Song of John Coltrane, four-line stanzas list the sounds and experiences that made young Coltrane into the great musician he became. Sean Qualls’s paintings show John listening, focusing, soaking it all in. By the end, he’s making his own music, and the collage, acrylic, and pencil illustrations shift from the realistic to shapes and colors evoking music. An appended author’s note includes selected listening. (Holt, 2008)
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