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Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
Robin D.G. Kelley · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorPops: A Life of Louis Armstrong
Terry Teachout · 475 pages
Louis Armstrong was the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth century and a giant of modern American culture. Offstage he was witty, introspective and unexpectedly complex, a beloved colleague with an explosive temper whose larger-than-life personality was tougher and more sharp-edged than his worshipping fans ever knew. Wall Street Journal arts columnist Terry Teachout has drawn on new sources
Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke
Peter Guralnick · 759 pages
Acclaimed Elvis biographer Peter Guralnick returns with a revealing portrait of Sam Cooke--a black performer who appealed to white audiences, wrote his own songs, and controlled his own business destiny. Fully capturing Cooke's accomplishments, "Dream Boogie" also conveys the astonishing richness of the black America of this era. 55 b/w photos.
The One: The Life and Music of James Brown
R.J. Smith · 455 pages
A tribute to the life and achievements of the "Godfather of Soul" covers his unconventional youth in a segregated South, his complicated family life, and his work as a civil rights advocate and entrepreneur.
Room Full Of Mirrors: A Biography Of Jimi Hendrix
Charles R. Cross · 416 pages
Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul
James McBride · 244 pages
"A product of the complicated history of the American South, James Brown was a cultural shape-shifter who arguably had the greatest influence of any artist on American popular music. Brown was long a figure of fascination for James McBride, a noted professional musician as well as a writer. When he received a tip that promised to uncover the man behind the myth, McBride set off to follow a trail t
This Is a Call: The Life and Times of Dave Grohl
Paul Brannigan · 400 pages
The epic story of a singular career that includes Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, and Them Crooked Vultures. Based on ten years of original, exclusive interviews with the man himself and conversations with a legion of musical associates like Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme, DC punk legend Ian MacKaye, and Nevermind producer Butch Vig, this is Grohl₂s story. He speaks ca
Kansas City Lightning
Stanley Crouch · 382 pages
The first installment in the long-awaited portrait of one of the most talented and influential musicians of the twentieth century. Charlie Parker personified the tortured American artist: a revolutionary performer who used his alto saxophone to create a new music known as bebop even as he wrestled with a drug addiction that would lead to his death at 34. With the wisdom of a jazz scholar, the cult
Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy
Harry Shapiro, Caesar Glebbeek · 723 pages
Biography of the rock musician's life from his boyhood to his tragic death.
No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan
Robert Shelton · 573 pages
Explores the artistic and spiritual births, deaths, and rebirths, the guises and incarnations, that are Bob Dylan.
Beethoven
Maynard Solomon · 400 pages
Maynard Solomon's Beethoven, first published in 1977, was instantly hailed as a major reinterpretation of the life, personality, and works of the enigmatic genius. Now, a generation later, the book has been thoroughly revised, updated, and expanded by the author to incorporate new materials and the findings of later research. Solomon divides Beethoven's life and works into four periods. In part o
Johannes Brahms: A Biography
Jan Swafford · 736 pages
Jan Swafford takes a fresh look at Brahms, giving us for the first time a fully realized portrait of the man who created the magnificent music. Brahms was a man with many friends and no intimates, who experienced triumphs few artists achieve in their lifetime. Yet he lived with a relentless loneliness and a growing fatalism about the future of music and the world. The Brahms that emerges from the
Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story
David Buckley · 688 pages
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen
Sylvie Simmons · 584 pages
Garcia: An American Life
Blair Jackson · 580 pages
"Garcia: An American Life is the first comprehensive biography of the late leader and guitarist of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia (1942-1995). Garcia's saga courses through some of the most fascinating epochs of postwar American history: From the flowering of Haight-Ashbury through Woodstock and Altamont, the Dead became synonymous with the libertine values of the late'60s counterculture, and Gar
Petty: The Biography
Warren Zanes · 323 pages
Zanes provides an honest and evocative examination of Petty's music, and the remarkable rock and roll history he and his band helped to write. Petty was a kid without a whole lot of promise; rock and roll made it otherwise. His story has all the drama of a rock and roll epic. Dark and mysterious, Petty manages to come back, again and again, showing us what the music can do and where it can take us
Bird Lives!: The High Life & Hard Times of Charlie (Yardbird) Parker
Ross Russell · 404 pages
Bowie In Berlin: A New Career In A New Town
Thomas Jerome Seabrook · 272 pages
By 1975 rock icon David Bowie was in crisis. Lost in Los Angeles, he was ravaged by cocaine abuse, overwork, and an obsession with the occult, while his marriage lay in tatters. Desperate to reignite his creative spark, Bowie relocated in mid-1976 to Berlin, accompanied by an equally troubled Iggy Pop, former Stooges front man. The move to Berlin proved fortuitous both personally and professionall
Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson
Peter Ames Carlin · 352 pages
Crazy Diamond: Syd Barrett and the Dawn of Pink Floyd
Mike Watkinson, Pete Anderson · 192 pages
Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend
Stephen Davis · 482 pages
"Jim Morrison's poetic vision, electrifying live performances, and voracious appetite for sexual, spiritual, and psychedelic experience inflamed the spirit and psyche of a generation. During his scorching rise to stardom as the lead singer of the Doors in the 1960s, his voice and lyrics reached out to the darkest thoughts and most passionate desires of fans around the world." "In Jim Morrison, cr
Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician
Christoph Wolff · 620 pages
Finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. A landmark biography of Bach on the 250th anniversary of the composer's death, written by the leading Bach scholar of our age. Although we have heard the music of J. S. Bach in countless performances and recordings, the composer himself still comes across only as an enigmatic figure in a single familiar portrait. As we mark the 250th anniversar