jazz musician biographies
Bird on a Wire
Stanley Crouch gives us the best biography yet of Charlie Parker, the first jazz musician to let the saxophone lead the way, and the seminal musician who could make his horn sound “sweet,” yet “devoid of pity.”
Life Played By Ear
A new biography of Louis Armstrong refuses to draw a firm distinction between art and commercial entertainment, and argues that Armstrong himself made no such distinction, indeed would hardly have understood it.