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A brilliant, easy read . . . as a jazz primer it would be impossible to surpass.
Marvelous and moving. . . . This book is like a great jazz solo, but instead of using a sax and notes, Terkel uses a pen and words.
An ideal introduction [to jazz] for the young reader.
Who better to fashion these thirteen profiles of jazz greats than Studs Terkel?
Giants of Jazz
paperback
$14.95 / £8.99
—CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
Studs Terkel’s first book, Giants of Jazz, is the master interviewer’s unique tribute to America’s jazz greats, now available in an affordable paperback edition with the original illustrations and discography.
The thirteen profiles in this “luminous” (Jazzwise) collection weave together stories of the individual jazz musicians’ lives with the history of the jazz era, and the music’s evolution from the speakeasies of New York to the concert halls of the world’s greatest cities. Terkel—a lifelong fan and friend of many of these legends—uses firsthand interviews with artists such as Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker to tell the human stories behind the giants who shaped this uniquely American music form. Some of the many fascinating details Terkel relates include Joe Oliver’s favorite meal, Fats Waller’s 1932 rendezvous in Paris with eminent organist Marcel Dupré, Dizzy Gillespie’s childhood trip to a pawnshop to buy his first horn, and the origin of Billie Holiday’s nickname.
Studs Terkel is the author of twelve books of oral history, including, most recently, And They All Sang (The New Press). Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters, he was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003. He lives in Chicago.
Fall 2006
paperback
5 1/4 x 7 1/2, 224 pages
978-1-56584-999-0
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