Here are 78 books that Trombone Shorty fans have personally recommended if you like
Trombone Shorty.
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I have been writing and illustrating books for fifteen years, and I am passionate about the art of making picture books. I love music and dance too. While making this list, I was amazed by how different visual artists that I admire—and who have very different styles—were able to capture movement, rhythm, and energy. I was also fascinated by how the different authors crafted their stories and yet all of them managed to celebrate Black culture and resilience.
I love Gregory Christie’s artwork. His naïf style illustrations may seem crude and simple at first glance, but I think they are incredibly rhythmic and powerful.
His images pair seamlessly with the book's lyrical text, which depicts the awful hardships that enslaved people in New Orleans endured and the joy they felt on Sundays when they were free to play music, dance, and spend time together in Congo Square.
Winner of a Caldecott Honor and a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2016 A School Library Journal Best Book of 2016: Nonfiction Starred reviews from School Library Journal, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, and The Horn Book Magazine A Junior Library Guild Selection
This poetic, nonfiction story about a little-known piece of African American history captures a human's capacity to find hope and joy in difficult circumstances and demonstrates how New Orleans' Congo Square was truly freedom's heart.
Since losing his mom, thirteen-year-old Jack Wilson has spent most of his time seeing just how much trouble he can get away with so that he feels like a winner at something. But he takes his mischief too far and is faced with the possibility of unbearable consequences. He…
I have been writing and illustrating books for fifteen years, and I am passionate about the art of making picture books. I love music and dance too. While making this list, I was amazed by how different visual artists that I admire—and who have very different styles—were able to capture movement, rhythm, and energy. I was also fascinated by how the different authors crafted their stories and yet all of them managed to celebrate Black culture and resilience.
Christian Robinson is one of my favorite illustrators. His images are very free and childlike while also being incredibly poignant and strongly designed. His artwork pairs beautifully with Hruby Powell’s exuberant text.
The book recounts Josephine Baker’s extraordinary life, from growing up poor in Missouri to becoming a beloved dancer and star in Paris. Both text and images denounce with wit and force the cruel segregation that Black people, including Josephine, experienced in the United States for a large part of the twentieth century.
An emotionally powerful biography told in verse of a dancer, singer, comedienne, and enduring figure - Josephine Baker - from her birth in the slums, her fantastic success, and her fight against racial prejudice.
I have been writing and illustrating books for fifteen years, and I am passionate about the art of making picture books. I love music and dance too. While making this list, I was amazed by how different visual artists that I admire—and who have very different styles—were able to capture movement, rhythm, and energy. I was also fascinated by how the different authors crafted their stories and yet all of them managed to celebrate Black culture and resilience.
The illustrations in this book are fantastic. They are filled with pastel blues, reds, floating circles, and overlapping shapes. They are very atmospheric. It feels like I’m listening to one of John Coltrane’s melodies.
The text is musical, too. The short and lyrical lines focus on the sounds that Coltrane heard as a boy and the events in his early life that inspired him to become a Jazz giant. The book’s ending is great. It is very satisfying.
Young John Coltrane was all ears. And there was a lot to hear growing up in the South in the 1930s: preachers praying, music on the radio, the bustling of the household. These vivid noises shaped John's own sound as a musician. Carole Boston Weatherford and Sean Qualls have composed an amazingly rich hymn to the childhood of jazz legend John Coltrane.
Before John Was a Jazz Giant is a 2009 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Book and a 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
A gay retelling of the classic fairy tale--a scrumptious love story featuring ungrateful stepsiblings, a bake-off, and a fairy godfather.
Cinderelliot is stuck at home taking care of his ungrateful stepsister and stepbrother. When Prince Samuel announces a kingdom-wide competition to join the royal staff as his baker, the stepsiblings…
I have been writing and illustrating books for fifteen years, and I am passionate about the art of making picture books. I love music and dance too. While making this list, I was amazed by how different visual artists that I admire—and who have very different styles—were able to capture movement, rhythm, and energy. I was also fascinated by how the different authors crafted their stories and yet all of them managed to celebrate Black culture and resilience.
Brian Pinkney’s scratchboard and oil pastel illustrations are full of energy. They capture Alvin Ailey’s movement and grace. Both the art and the text are thoughtful and very well-researched.
The book shows Alvin Ailey leaving Texas as a young man, discovering dance in LA, and creating the first modern dance company that celebrated the heritage of African-American people. I especially love the illustration of Alvin Ailey arriving in New York with the buildings in the background as if “his dreams soared higher than the tallest skyscrapers.”
The book has a beautiful full-circle moment that shows how Alvin Ailey incorporated gospel traditions from his church in Texas into one of his company’s first suite of dances.
An informative and inspiring biography of Alvin Ailey, the great African-American dancer and choreographer, created by TheNew York Times bestselling and award-winning duo Andrea David Pinkney and Brian Pinkey.
Since he was a young boy in Navasota, Texas, Alvin Ailey loved to stomp his feed and clap his hands to the music of the True Vine Baptist choir. Later, he learned how to dance. He spent some time with the best teachers of the era and eventually started his own modern dance company, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
This is the story of Alvin Ailey's life—a life that left…
I grew up in a family of church singers. As a young man, I studied poetry and piano, literature and guitar, listening to Hank Williams and reading William Faulkner while dreaming of becoming a Nashville songwriter. Eventually, I performed as a singer-songwriter myself on three continents, so it’s entirely honest to say that music, language, and stories have always been the fabric of my life. These novels represent everything I love about music and how it connects us—to people, to worlds beyond—and I hope you find them just as meaningful (and occasionally heartwrenching) as I have.
I can think of few books in the English language with more music in the prose. Certainly, I could describe how devastating it was to journey through this story of madness, radical artistic talent, and the birth of jazz. And yes, I could describe how Buddy Bolden’s very existence seems as heartwrenching as the cornet notes he plays.
But really, for me, it’s the music of Ondaatje’s language—not the song lyrics printed on the page, but the rhythm and poetry that transforms the story into its own tragic song. It’s an absolute wonder.
Discover Michael Ondaatje's debut novel, 'a beautifully detailed story, perhaps the finest jazz novel ever written' Sunday Times
Based on the life of cornet player Buddy Bolden, one of the legendary jazz pioneers of turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans, Coming Through Slaughter is an extraordinary recreation of a remarkable musical life and a tragic conclusion. Through a collage of memoirs, interviews, imaginary conversations and monologues, Ondaatje builds a picture of a man who would work by day at a barber shop and by night unleash his talent to wild audiences who had never experienced such playing. But Buddy was also playing the…
Lilian Terry’s background is quite out-of-the-ordinary. Born in Egypt in 1930 to Maltese and Italian parents, she undertook academic studies in Cairo and Florence. Terry studied classical piano until age 17, developing an interest in jazz in her early teens. She participated in a variety of ways with jazz in Europe, beginning in the 1950s. As a singer, she was an active performer and recording artist. At the same time, she produced radio and television shows for Italy’s RAI network, and this activity led to some of her encounters with major figures of American jazz. Seven of these interactions (most of which spanned decades) are the subject of Dizzy, Duke, Brother Ray, and Friends.
Donald Marquis takes you firmly by the hand and leads you into that Wonderland that was New Orleans from 1877, when Bolden was born; then through the brief but extraordinary rise of Bolden’s personality and the powerful sound of his trumpet echoing through the streets of New Orleans. The author brings out Buddy’s tragic descent into mental illness, his entrance into the Insane Asylum of Louisiana, and his untimely death in 1930 at the young age of thirty-three. The book is a very sober tale of life in those times, it is rooted in the political and artistic history of jazz music and a very touching homage to a ghost. Today there are people wondering if Buddy Bolden really did exist?
The beginnings of jazz and the story of Charles ""Buddy"" Bolden (1877- 1931) are inextricably intertwined. Just after the turn of the century, New Orleanians could often hear Bolden's powerful horn from the city's parks and through dance hall windows. Despite his lack of formal training, his unique style- both musical and personal- made him the first ""king"" of New Orleans jazz and the inspiration for such later jazz greats as King Oliver, Kid Ory, and Louis Armstrong.
For years the legend of Buddy Bolden was overshadowed by myths about his music, his reckless lifestyle, and his mental instability. In…
Zeni lives in the Flint Hills of Southeast Kansas. This tale begins with her dream of befriending a miniature zebu calf coming true and follows Zeni as she works to befriend Zara. Enjoy full-color illustrations and a story filled with whimsy and plenty of opportunity for discussions around the perspectives…
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.
Pianist Hawes is an under-sung master of the early bebop period. This supremely readable narrative tells the story of how he met and played with Charlie Parker already in his teen years, painting a picture of how jazz musicians lived in the heyday of the bebop revolution. A fun and informative book.
Hampton Hawes [1928–1977] was one of jazz's greatest pianists. Among his peers from California the self-taught Hawes was second only to Oscar Peterson. At the time of his celebration as New Star of the Year by downbeat magazine (1956), Hawes was already struggling with a heroin addiction that would lead to his arrest and imprisonment, and the interruption of a brilliant career. In 1963 President John F. Kennedy granted Hawes an Executive Pardon. In eloquent and humorous language Hampton Hawes tells of a life of suffering and redemption that reads like an improbable novel. Gary Giddins has called it "a…
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.
One of the important figures in the world of jazz for many years was Leonard Feather. He started his career as a jazz writer—writing the first profile of Billie Holiday—but eventually became a songwriter and producer. He produced Billie Holiday’s highly successful 1954 European Tour called Club USA.
Well into his career, he collected this book of essays about the jazz figures he knew well: Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Ray Ellis, among others. I really like his essay on Billie, whom he knew so well she became his daughter’s godmother because he was able to relate events about which he knew because he was in the room with her when they happened.
If you want to meet jazz luminaires first-hand, trust Leonard Feather to provide the introduction.
Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Norman Granz, Oscar Peterson, Ray Charles, Don Ellis, and Miles Davis,these are the dozen jazz figures whom Leonard Feather chose to describe the development of jazz. This is the first Feather book to examine in-depth the innovative figures who have led the way throughout the music's history. As composer, producer, and for almost half-a-century one of its leading critics, Feather has a unique perspective of these jazz immortals. He has worked with and known all of them. "These are portraits of human beings first, analyses of…
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.
One of the treasures of American show business is Hazel Scott. A child prodigy on piano who attended Julliard, a headliner at Café Society thanks to Billie Holiday’s mentorship, and eventually the wife of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., she was the first African American to host her own television show, “The Hazel Scott Show,” in 1950.
A confrontation with the House Un-American Activities Committee prompted the cancellation of her network show, which led her to go into a kind of exile in Paris where she set up a salon that saw as guests everyone from Lester Young to the Beatles.
Karen Chilton vividly documents the life and times of the singer in this book. I love the book because it captures the artistry of a true original. In the future, more attention should be paid to Hazel Scott, who has become show business history’s forgotten genius.
Hazel Scott was an important figure in the later part of the Black renaissance onward. Even in an era where there was limited mainstream recognition of Black Stars, Hazel Scott's talent stood out and she is still fondly remembered by a large segment of the community. I am pleased to see her legend honored. ---Melvin Van Peebles, filmmaker and director""This book is really, really important. It comprises a lot of history---of culture, race, gender, and America. In many ways, Hazel's story is the story of the twentieth century."" ---Murray Horwitz, NPR commentator and coauthor ofAin't Misbehavin'""Karen Chilton has deftly woven…
An interdimensional mixer with angels and other beings brings unexpected trouble for Malachi and his friends in this smart and uniquely funny second book about the squad of teens from hell.
When an angel comes to his home to deliver a message, Malachi immediately knows what’s going on. The seraph…
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…
