One of the finest lineups in the history of jazz - Bobby Timmons, Jymie Merritt, Benny Golson, and the legendary trumpet player, Lee Morgan. This historic concert, filmed in Belgium in 1958, is the only known visual of this influential band.

"Beginning with his childhood growing up in Chicago’s Cabrini Green neighborhood, Ramsey Lewis recounts his memories of the music in his parents’ church and his early piano lessons. As he learned classical technique, Lewis also absorbed countless jazz records and heard gospel music weekly, finally becoming a performer himself in his teenage years. With his coauthor and collaborator, Aaron Cohen, Lewis describes his early steps in jazz from joining...

A one-hundredth birthday tribute to the late jazz artist explores his observations about humanity's discriminatory and violent behaviors as well as his efforts to forge world peace through music with the Sun Ra Arkestra.

"A biography of African American musician Melba Doretta Liston, a virtuoso musician who played the trombone and composed and arranged music for many of the great jazz musicians of the twentieth century"--Provided by publisher.

"Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool tells the story of the legendary trumpeter, bandleader, innovator, and trend-setter who crossed musical genres and whose life was notable on and off stage. Directed by award-winning documentarian Stanley Nelson, it features Davis's music from live performances, studio recordings, outtakes, and interviews with those who knew him best....In making the film, Nelson had full access to the Miles Davis estate and to private...

"Thelonious Monk is the critically acclaimed, gripping saga of an artist’s struggle to 'make it' without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the twentieth century. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations,...

"This is the story of three revolutionary American musicians, the maestro jazzmen who orchestrated the chords that throb at the soul of twentieth-century America. Duke Ellington, the grandson of slaves who was christened Edward Kennedy Ellington, was a man whose story is as layered and nuanced as his name suggests and whose music transcended category. Louis Daniel Armstrong was born in a New Orleans slum so tough it was called The Battlefield and,...

"Harlem, 1936. Clyde 'The Viper' Morton boards a train from Alabama to Harlem to chase his dreams of being a jazz musician. When his talent fails him, he becomes caught up in the dangerous underbelly of Harlem’s drug trade. In this heartbreaking novel, one man must decide what he is willing to give up and what he wants to fight for." --back cover