This text tells the story of this music portraying the legendary jazz players, the breakthrough styles, and the world in which it evolved. From the rent parties of Harlem to the after-hours spots in Kansas City, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington to Wynton Marsalis and Pat Metheny.

Studs Terkel explores the ultimate human experience, that of death and the possibility of life afterward. Death is the one experience we all share but cannot know. In Will the Circle be Unbroken? , a wide range of people address the final experience and its impact on the present in which we live.

A study of saxophone legend John Coltrane's signature album. Among the images published here for the first time are Coltrane's hand-written poem A Love Supreme that was printed in the original album and in-studio photographs of Coltrane and his sidemen recording A Love Supreme in 1964.

Mingus by Mingus. From the shabby roadhouses to fabulous estates, from the psychiatric ward of Bellevue to worlds of mysticism and solitude, these are the celebrated, demonic, anguished and, above all, profoundly moving memoirs of the great jazz bassist and compose Charles Mingus.

A frank autobiography of the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. This book records his life - the music, the women and the drugs. It talks about the white promotors and producers who exploited black musicians as well as the critics.

The fascinating story of an extraordinary revolutionary and his twenty-two year prison ordeal.