Here are 100 books that Leader of the Band fans have personally recommended if you like
Leader of the Band.
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Since childhood, I have been obsessed with understanding everything — science and the universe. Now, in this age of the JWST and a burgeoning space industry, I do sub-quantum mechanics research at an international physics think-tank, The Quantum Bicycle Society. My own hard sci-fi novel is intended to help publicize these scientific advances, as well as the behavioral psychology concepts that are the subject of my next nonfiction book, The Animal In The Mirror. The books on this list represent the foundation of inspiration that propelled my formative sci-fi journey, stories that also shine the light of insight onto our shared, instinctive nature.
This is my favorite hard sci-fi classic. I love the beautiful mix of real science (wormholes excepted), compelling story, and characters, and it touches on both first contact and the way in which human nature might cause us to react to it. That is the power combo, in my opinion!
The movie of the book was very good — Robert Zemeckis is a brilliant director — although it left out some fantastic details that, as a math and science fan, I really loved! (I won’t spoil it here; it’s too good.)
Stories, essays & dialogues about art, imagination & the erotic life. A young man named Charles writes a series of erotic tales, and his bookish friend Lisa offers light-hearted critiques of them.
Some stories feel like erotic meditations or random erotic moments in a young man's life. Others start with…
Astronomy teaches us that our bodies are quite literally star stuff, chemical elements made inside exploding stars. For much of my life, I studied and researched astronomy in universities, and in observatories on remote and beautiful mountain tops and in space. I explored the cosmos for its own sake, but I came to realise also that we are literally and metaphorically a part of the Universe, not apart from it. Just as the science of astronomy has done for me, these novels put humanity against the same backdrop: cosmic lives seen through women’s eyes.
Caroline Herschel was the sister of William Herschel, a church organist and piano tutor, latterly the discoverer of the planet Uranus, a mapper of the skies, and an astronomer at the court of King George III. At first, she devoted herself to her brother, acting as his housekeeper, musical accompanist, and PA in Bath and then as his scientific assistant in Slough, near Windsor Castle. She submerged her own volition to his. But gradually she found her own life in astronomy, and discovered 8 comets, pooh-poohed as small by the King but much appreciated by Queen Charlotte and her ladies. She became known internationally in her own right. She lived to a considerable old age in Hannover, where she was born. The book is a fictionalised but real-life story that echoes between the eighteenth century and our own time.
This is a story of love and astronomy; music and silence; secrets and truth-telling; of world-changing discoveries, and unrequited desire. Moving from York in the 1780s to Regency Bath, and then to Hanover in the 1840s, it concerns the lives of three people-all astronomers. There is Caroline, torn between her passion for music and her passion for the stars; John, deaf from childhood, whose extraordinary mathematical gifts afford him perspectives not available to others; and Edward, friend and mentor to Caroline and to John, who must conceal his innermost feelings from them both. All three find fulfilment in the heavens…
Astronomy teaches us that our bodies are quite literally star stuff, chemical elements made inside exploding stars. For much of my life, I studied and researched astronomy in universities, and in observatories on remote and beautiful mountain tops and in space. I explored the cosmos for its own sake, but I came to realise also that we are literally and metaphorically a part of the Universe, not apart from it. Just as the science of astronomy has done for me, these novels put humanity against the same backdrop: cosmic lives seen through women’s eyes.
Scottish astronomer and novelist Pippa Goldschmidt mixes astronomy and fiction in her novel. The book provides insight into the way that astronomy is carried out now in modern, remote, mountain-top observatories and in space (I can vouch for its verisimilitude). Jeanette is a young, lonely, junior researcher working in a university department dominated by male egos and incompetents. She puts academic politics and unsatisfactory affairs aside and travels to a mountain-top observatory in Chile for her research, making an unexpected discovery that throws her into conflict with her colleagues. Like her love life, her scientific life spirals out of her control: the Universe is ordered by science but her life and the lives of scientists are not.
A blackly comic campus satire combined with a heart-breaking family mystery, The Falling Sky brilliantly mixes fiction and astronomy into a fascinating, compelling, and moving narrative
Jeanette is a young, solitary post-doctoral researcher who has dedicated her life to studying astronomy. Struggling to compete in a prestigious university department dominated by egos and incompetents, and caught in a cycle of brief and unsatisfying affairs, she travels to a mountaintop observatory in Chile to focus on her research. There Jeanette stumbles upon evidence that will challenge the fundamentals of the universe, drawing her into conflict with her colleagues and the scientific…
Stories, essays & dialogues about art, imagination & the erotic life. A young man named Charles writes a series of erotic tales, and his bookish friend Lisa offers light-hearted critiques of them.
Some stories feel like erotic meditations or random erotic moments in a young man's life. Others start with…
Astronomy teaches us that our bodies are quite literally star stuff, chemical elements made inside exploding stars. For much of my life, I studied and researched astronomy in universities, and in observatories on remote and beautiful mountain tops and in space. I explored the cosmos for its own sake, but I came to realise also that we are literally and metaphorically a part of the Universe, not apart from it. Just as the science of astronomy has done for me, these novels put humanity against the same backdrop: cosmic lives seen through women’s eyes.
In this Wessex novel by Thomas Hardy, Lady Constantine’s explorer-husband has been missing for years when she offers patronage to the Byronic astronomer, Swithin St. Cleeve, letting him use a tower on her estate as an observatory. He shows her the stars through his telescope, passionately explaining what lies behind the astronomical images. Presuming her husband dead, she secretly marries St Cleeve, but a complicated legacy intrudes, and it transpires that her husband has been living with an African princess before blowing his head off. Suicide, bigamy, a lost legacy, an illegitimate child, the plot lines (there are many more than I have mentioned!) are resolved by numerous and dramatic deaths. This scandalous romance is melodramatically plotted, but gains a certain sublime power as an “emotional history of two infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe".
TWO ON A TOWER (1882) is a tale of star-crossed love in which Hardy sets the emotional lives of his two lovers against the background of the stellar universe. The unhappily married Lady Constantine breaks all the rules of social decorum when she falls in love with Swithin St. Cleeve, an astronomer who is ten years her junior. Her husband's death leaves the lovers free to marry, but the discovery of a legacy forces them apart. This is Hardy's most complete treatment of the theme of love across the class and age divide and the fullest expression of his fascination…
As a scholar as well as performer of the African American creative improvised music usually called jazz, my attunement to this art form resonates with its historico-cultural matrix as much as with the sounds themselves. These books distinguish themselves for being well-researched and rigorous. They are the real deal, doing justice to the heart as well as the intellect of this art form.
This scrupulous 624-page tome elucidates the life and work of the High Priest of Bebop, Saint Thelonious Monk, in amazing detail and exactitude, while remaining supremely engaging and easy to read. The fact that the author developed the book with members of Monk’s family comes through in the authenticity of the narrative.
The image of Thelonious Sphere Monk (1917-1982), with his trademark goatee, dark glasses, and hat, is today a poster-image of coolness just as Che Guevara's face once was an image of rebellion. Jazz fans revere Monk for his ground-breaking compositions and piano playing from the 1950s and 1960s, but to a wider audience he stands for something much bigger: the very idea of native genius; a quirky, absent-minded, unalloyed originality that is the perfect symbol of the indefinable essence of jazz. Monk's creations from the 1950s and 1960s rank among jazz's most beloved classics, yet Kelley shows that the life…
I can’t imagine going through a day without listening to music. I remember buying my first Beatles album at eight years old. I saw Elvis on his last tour, Whitney Houston on her first, and Barbra Streisand on her comeback tour—twice. I remember listening to “Kind of Blue” the first time. I remember seeing Ella Fitzgerald late in her career at a club in Houston; her body was failing her—she had to sit in a chair to sing—but her voice was as beautiful as ever. Of all the artists I’ve admired over the years, the one whose work has consistently spoken to me most profoundly is Billie Holiday.
Throughout her career, Billie Holiday always gave credit for her unique singing style to Louis Armstrong, not just the way he played the trumpet, which clearly influenced her, but the vernacular approach he had to singing.
Armstrong’s musicality allowed him to enjoy a one-of-a-kind career in show business, which Ricky Riccardi lovingly captures in his book, at least the part covering the final years of Armstrong’s life. Riccardi is particularly good on “Hello Dolly!,” Armstrong’s swan song.
Prodigiously researched and richly detailed, this is a comprehensive account of the remarkable final twenty-five years of the life and art of one of America’s greatest and most beloved musical icons.
Much has been written about Louis Armstrong, but the majority of it focuses on the early and middle stages of his long career. Now, Ricky Riccardi—jazz scholar and musician—takes an in-depth look at the years in which Armstrong was often dismissed as a buffoonish, if popular, entertainer, and shows us instead the inventiveness and depth of expression that his music evinced during this time.
I grew up hearing jazz thanks to my dad, a big swing fan who allegedly played Duke Ellington for me in the crib. My father couldn’t believe it when I developed a taste for “modern jazz,” bebop, even Coltrane, but he never threw me out. Fifty years later I still love to play jazz on drums and listen to as much as I can. But along the way, I realized the world might be better served by me writing about the music than trying to make a living performing it. I had the great privilege of studying jazz in graduate school and wrote about big-band jazz for my first book, which helped launch my career.
Space Is the Place opened so many windows for me into a world of esoteric spirituality fused with mind-blowing musical and theatrical creativity. John Szwed was a member of my PhD dissertation committee, although it was pretty hard to track him down, and he was wrapping up this book as I finished my own. I’d seen Sun Ra at my college and thought of the Arkestra as a kind of spaced-out novelty act, not knowing anything about Ra’s history: his celestial epiphanies; his long immersion in big-band jazz, including his stint with the great Fletcher Henderson; the cadre of stellar musicians he recruited and molded for the Arkestra; his entrepreneurial streak. When I turned to the study of music and spirituality, Szwed’s biography became an indispensable source. Afrofuturism has become a very hot topic in contemporary cultural studies, and there’s no better way into its arcane mysteries than through this…
Considered by many to be a founder of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra-aka Herman Blount-was a composer, keyboardist, bandleader, philosopher, entrepreneur, poet, and self-proclaimed extraterrestrial from Saturn. He recorded over 200 albums with his Arkestra, which, dressed in Egypto-space costumes, played everything from boogie-woogie and swing to fusion and free jazz. John Szwed's Space is the Place is the definitive biography of this musical polymath, who was one of the twentieth century's greatest avant-garde artists and intellectuals. Charting the whole of Sun Ra's life and career, Szwed outlines how after years in Chicago as a blues and swing band pianist, Sun Ra…
I grew up hearing jazz thanks to my dad, a big swing fan who allegedly played Duke Ellington for me in the crib. My father couldn’t believe it when I developed a taste for “modern jazz,” bebop, even Coltrane, but he never threw me out. Fifty years later I still love to play jazz on drums and listen to as much as I can. But along the way, I realized the world might be better served by me writing about the music than trying to make a living performing it. I had the great privilege of studying jazz in graduate school and wrote about big-band jazz for my first book, which helped launch my career.
Everyone knows that jazz is intimately and inextricably linked to Africa, but no book does a better job of breaking down just how strong this relationship is. Pianist Randy Weston and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik are pretty well known, but Kelley uncovers lots of fascinating new material on both musicians and their transnational connections. Drummer Guy Warren and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin were new to me and both turned out to have incredible backstories. Kelley is as compelling on the jazz scenes of Cape Town and Lagos as he is on the more familiar haunts of Chicago and New York. It was such an exciting historical moment, with one African nation after another breaking free of their colonial subjugators. The jazz world was bursting with creativity. Anything seemed possible. Kelley knows the jazz world inside and out and writes beautifully.
In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, pianist Randy Weston and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik celebrated with song the revolutions spreading across Africa. In Ghana and South Africa, drummer Guy Warren and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin fused local musical forms with the dizzying innovations of modern jazz. These four were among hundreds of musicians in the 1950s and '60s who forged connections between jazz and Africa that definitively reshaped both their music and the world.
Each artist identified in particular ways with Africa's struggle for liberation and made music dedicated to, or inspired by, demands for independence and self-determination. That music was the wild, boundary-breaking…
I started buying records 70 years ago. I worked in a car factory for a decade, then landed a job in publishing, having written a couple of magazine articles, and finally got a chance to do what I was born to do: write about my favorite subject. Music has been the most important thing in the world to me ever since I heard the hits of the 1940s on the radio, playing on the kitchen floor while my mother did the ironing. I believe music is a mystery, more important than we can know, in every way: intellectual, psychological, emotional, philosophical. That is why it is such a big business, even if the business itself is often less than salubrious.
Terry Gibbs played vibes (vibraphone) with several of the most famous big bands during the Swing Era, than formed his own small groups, then led big bands himself starting in 1956. Steeped in Swing, he also held his own with the modernists. Perhaps his most amazing accomplishment was putting together his Dream Band, which recorded at least 68 selections, arranged by all the best arrangers in the business, in four different clubs in Hollywood, mostly in 1959. It was a 'dream band' because although the big band era was over, all the best musicians on the West Coast wanted to play in this one because the music was so much fun. Gibbs was in his 90s when his book came out; he knew how lucky he had been, and his book is full of joy and love.
Terry Gibbs, legendary jazz vibraphonist and bandleader, was 12 years old when he kicked off his career as a professional musician, winning first place in an amateur performance. Born and raised in the heart of Brooklyn and possessing tremendous musical talent, Gibbs learned the ins and outs of bebop from pioneers like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Bud Powell. In 1959 his ensemble, later dubbed The Dream Band, became the toast of Hollywood. Four decades, 65 albums, and 300 compositions later, his story is one of great substance-his foot-tapping music, revolutionary. Good Vibes is a rollicking autobiography that tracks jazz…
I’ve loved jazz ever since I learned to play the clarinet as a child. My two great loves in life have been music and books, so it made sense to combine the two things and write novels with a link to jazz. These books are some of my favourites with a jazz theme. I promise that even if you’re not a jazz fan, these are all excellent novels, to be enjoyed with or without music playing in the background!
I love untold stories – those that look at people who history has often ignored. There are a lot of novels set in WWII, but this is the only one I’ve read that looks at what it was like to be an Afro-German during that period.
Hiero Falk is a mixed-race jazz trumpeter, member of a band who has been banned from playing live under Nazi laws. After escaping with two of his African-American bandmates to Paris, Hiero is forced into hiding as the trio struggle to get out of occupied France. There was so much history here that felt new to me and I was fascinated by Hiero’s story.
Man Booker Prize Finalist 2011 An Oprah Magazine Best Book of the Year
Shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction
Berlin, 1939. The Hot Time Swingers, a popular jazz band, has been forbidden to play by the Nazis. Their young trumpet-player Hieronymus Falk, declared a musical genius by none other than Louis Armstrong, is arrested in a Paris café. He is never heard from again. He was twenty years old, a German citizen. And he was black.
Berlin, 1952. Falk is a jazz legend. Hot Time Swingers band members Sid Griffiths and…
