100 Books Like Notes and Tones

Want to write about music and musicians? You’ll need to understand the world in which they live. And if you’re writing about jazz and rock ‘n’ roll in the middle of the last century, that means a segregated, ugly world where even the most talented were treated as less than human. This was the world of the Chitlin’ Circuit. A dangerous, exciting, lawless network of nightclubs and juke joints from Memphis to New Orleans, Houston to Indianapolis, this topography spawned the popular music we love today. And nobody brings it to life like Lauterbach, whose reporting and language are as intense and musical as the era itself.

I love the idea of taking a very specific time period, in this case one year, and parsing out what happened within an art form. The evolution of pop music in 1971 was changing both the industry and the world. Throughout 12 months, we see the same characters weaving in and out — Carol King, Van Morrison, Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Mick Jagger — and the way they came together and pushed apart is its own year-long miniseries. To get at how art and industry cohabitate, and how we got to the pop culture machine we know today, there is no better crash course than 1971.

Growing up in Memphis, I heard a lot about Elvis Presley. From there, it was just a side step to Sun Studio and Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis. But there was this place across town — Stax. It was in a place called Soulsville, and it was magical. An old movie theater where Blacks and whites came together in the 1960s and ‘70s to make some of the best music anywhere — soul music. Not the polished sounds of Motown, but gritty, stirring music from the gut. In my writing a fictional world of music, the very real world of Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, Booker T. & the MG’s, and so many others provided inspiration against a backdrop of exultation, innovation, beauty, and tragedy. 

Quincy Jones knows everybody. He’s worked with everybody. To study the life of Quincy Jones is to study popular music as we know it today. From jazz to soul to R&B to pop, Q has had a hand and a tapping toe in all genres and the lives of those who produced it. His love and passion for music of any genre are infectious. I’ve always been interested in not just the music itself, but in how it’s made, why it’s made, and who makes it, and this autobiography pulls back the curtain on it all. 

For the same reason I would recommend attending any musical performance by John Birks ‘Dizzy’ Gillespie: Sheer entertainment, surprisingly touching aspects of his personality, instant feelings of friendship shared, and his unbreakable optimism, with which to face and endure whatever life had in store for him. In Italy he was a beloved “Italian,” officially elected honorary citizen of Bassano del Grappa, where we had opened the “Dizzy Gillespie Popular School of Music” that carried an integrated section for blind students. When his memoirs were published he asked me to translate the book into Italian, therefore I had to read it with particular concentration. Many were the moments I would have to shut the book and laugh out loud! Oh yes, Diz the Wiz, or The Joyous Soul of Jazz!     

This book beautifully, soulfully and informatively documents the life of one of America's greatest artists. I reveled in its pages, marvelling at the inner workings of the man and at the fascinating life he led for decades at the forefront of American music.

At various times tragic, hilarious, enlightening, scary, off-putting and inspiring, he couldn't have made it more like his own music if he'd tried. I never met Miles, but this particular book has the ring of veracity about it—at times, brutally so—and the countless stories of virtually every notable musician in Jazz and beyond are entertaining and eye-opening. Loved it.

How do jazz musicians think about what they are doing when they are improvising within a group? How do they learn to do such a thing in the first place – going their own way, but still going there together?

This is an immersion into the minds of musicians, starting with their earliest days and going through the rigors of learning their craft and then mastering it. The combination of discipline and freedom, hard work and wild inventive joy, finding an individual voice, and being part of the larger whole – the things that make improvisation a breath-taking artistic high-wire act – come together in this book.

I can’t carry a tune in a bucket, but this book made me wish I was a jazz musician.

Saxophonist, flutist, and jazz educator Dave Liebman (born in 1946) was the son of two Jewish Brooklyn schoolteachers, who envisioned the same life for him — all the more so after he contracted polio at age nine. Much to their dismay, Liebman had different ideas. Because he couldn’t play sports, he nourished a passionate interest in music, first taking piano lessons, then moving on to his real interest, the saxophone. A strong student with an interest in history, he might have followed his parents’ wishes and become a teacher — until the night, at age 16, he took a date to the New York jazz club Birdland and heard the saxophone giant John Coltrane for the first time, and realized the one and only thing he wanted to do with his life.

Written in the form of a dialogue with the jazz writer and musician Lewis Porter, What It Is… show more.

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.

I highly value Condon’s ability to describe the daily anxiety and desperation of the poor jazz musicians, who constantly struggled to find work and pay the rent. He does so with great good humor. He tells a good story and he’s got a million of them, including a few about gangsters, but mostly about the many great jazz musicians like Bix Beiderbecke, whom he worked with and knew well. His many terse stories prove that brevity is the soul of wit. His dialogue is worthy of Ben Hecht—he’s good at wisecracks. I was sorry when the book came to an end.