Books like L'Esprit Manouche — picked by fans

Madame Sidney Pratten is a unique figure in the history of the guitar and sadly neglected by history. She was well known and well connected in her day and taught many notable members of Victorian London society to play guitar, including Princess Alexandra. Her real name was Catharina - in her public work she used her husband’s name, as was common at the time - and she published her Guitar School after many years of teaching, to great acclaim. It is the most informative, wise, and practical guitar book I know, full of useful information, beautiful music, and insight into the learning process.

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When I started playing guitar, all I wanted to do was play the blues. Why a working-class Scottish boy would be so entranced by music so culturally and geographically remote is curious even to me but this book gave me a way in, a key to unlock the skills required to emulate the sounds of the blues greats I loved to hear. As an autodidact, clear explanations, technical advice, and background information were essential to my development and I still use this book with students to this day. 

These timeless melodies, simple yet substantial, transcend time, culture, and locality, as demonstrated by the sudden wave of interest in sea shanties in the UK during the Covid pandemic lockdown. This book contains some of the best-known and loved tunes associated with the sea and the turbulent lives of those who make their living in its environs. Arranged in differing levels of difficulty, this book should amuse and delight anyone with a heart and an ear for a good tune.

Classical music is often seen as being unapproachable, demanding, and difficult, the domain of geniuses and prodigies not for ordinary mortals. This delightful book makes available some of the greatest guitar music ever written in a form that is accessible yet recognisable. It enables the intermediate-level guitarist to advance their abilities while playing pieces that will transfix any audience, impress friends and family and render great satisfaction to the performer. 

Bonnie was as beloved as her exquisite books, and this is one of my favorites (she also did one on Elvis). I miss this lady, but her work remains and Django is a marvelous tribute to one of the most unique and accomplished acoustic guitarists of all time. Reinhardt's story is inspiring because of his success as a Gypsy/Roma musician, but also because of how he became so masterful after a tragic accident that injured his hands. All about what passion can do in the face of difficult circumstances. 

The epic life of French jazz guitarist Django Reinhart deserves a Spielbergian biopic treatment. After the cart fire where he damaged his hand and the personal epiphany of hearing a Louis Armstrong record, the Gypsy guitarist would bring jazz to Europe with his near magical musical improvisations. He lived a wild, carefree life, full of big cars, large dreams, and sensual pleasures. When the Nazis took over Paris, he returned to his homeland, opened one of the city’s most dazzling nightclubs, and made hit records that flooded the French airwaves during the Occupation. When the war was over, his career went out like a light switch and Django repaired to a quiet life in a remote riverfront village, spending his time fishing and painting nudes. 

Howard was a top Los Angeles session guitarist (one of the fabled Wrecking Crew), jazz stylist, and brilliant visionary who combined his skills to create the Guitar Institute of Technology, an innovative, intensive program that trained thousands of professionals and transformed guitar education.

The Guitar Compendium is the result of Howard’s decades of research into learning theory and information flow applied to the guitar. It’s not a standard guitar method (and not designed for raw beginners), but rather a collection of practical, thought-provoking solutions to the universal challenges of learning and playing the instrument, from developing technique to breaking through creative roadblocks. If you’re an aspiring, curious, and perhaps frustrated guitarist, The Praxis System is a unique source of wisdom and inspiration from one of the greatest.

I love the way Mr. Mathews retains Monk’s personal and instantly recognizable sound while presenting very playable and economical jazz piano arrangements. I would recommend this to jazz piano students looking for a way to play Monk’s music as solo piano pieces. It's nice to be able to reference how to voice these tunes from a master who actually exchanged ideas with Monk himself. The collection includes some of the most popular Monk compositions along with some lesser-known gems.

When I began my book I’d been out of graduate school for 25 years. I read deeply to see what I’d missed and discovered what is now called cultural history. It seems to me that a great deal of it is written to a template rather than directly from the facts as discovered. Even though DeVeaux comes out of the academic world, I get no such sense from Bop. It’s brilliant. Immaculately researched and nicely written, it addresses the extraordinary transition of Black music from entertainment-driven (however artful) to art (however entertaining). It’s an important story, and DeVeaux tells it beautifully.

Any aficionado follower of our music is aware that – for all the lists of books on jazz, worldwide nowadays – in truth the very first nations to study seriously and passionately this extraordinary music called jazz were the European countries.   They discovered in the 1930s the magic of those Black orchestras that entertained the wealthy cruise ships travelling from the United States to France and Europe. The local musicians welcomed their Black colleagues who became their teachers. While in the United States jazz music was considered just another form of dance music, in Europe, it was examined, dissected, catalogued, and played with great passion.

The very first world book ever published on jazz came from Belgium in 1932, called At the Frontiers of Jazz by Robert Goffin (in the French language). Followed the famous Le Hot Jazz by Panassiè in 1934, today also translated into English. The dam was… show more.