Ever since she was a young girl, Lil Hardin played music with a beat. She jammed at home, at church, and even at her first job in a music store. At a time when women's only place in jazz was at the microphone, Lil earned a spot playing piano in Chicago's hottest band.

"Though a disability stunted his growth and left him with a hunched back, William Henry "Chick" Webb did not let that get in the way of his musical pursuits. Even as a young child, Chick saw the world as one big drum, pounding out rhythms on everything from stair railings to pots and pans. His love of percussion brought him to the big time as an influential big band leader. This picture-book biography details the life of black American jazz drummer...

"An illustrated exploration of how the expressionism and spontaneity of jazz spilled onto its album art, posters, and promotional photography, and even inspired standalone works of fine art"--

"An ensemble-cast novel about the perennial temptations of dangerous love, following a jazz musician and the multiple women -- some charmed by him, others scorned -- who find the power of their own voices in this thrilling debut It's 2013, and Circus Palmer, a forty-year-old Boston-based trumpet player and old-school ladies man, lives for his music, and refuses to be tied down. Before a gig in Miami, he learns that the woman who is secretly closest...

A PBS miniseries in which a black jazz band becomes a huge success and ends up entangled in the aristocratic world of 1930s London as they seek fame and fortune.

"By the 1930s, Briggs was considered "the Louis Armstrong of Paris," and was the peer of the greatest names of his time, from Josephine Baker to Django Reinhardt. In 1940, he was arrested and sent to the prison camp at Saint Denis. Based on groundbreaking research and including unprecedented access to Briggs's oral memoir, this is a crucial document of jazz history, a fast-paced epic, and an entirely original tale of survival"--

"From Poverty Row came a movie that, perhaps more than any other, epitomizes the dark fatalism at the heart of film noir. As he hitchhikes his way from New York to Los Angeles, a down-on-his-luck nightclub pianist (Tom Neal) finds himself with a dead body on his hands and nowhere to run -- a waking nightmare that goes from bad to worse when he picks up the most vicious femme fatale in cinema history, Ann Savage's snarling, monstrously conniving drifter...

A revealing look at an enigmatic yet endlessly appealing man, who soared to the heights of creative freedom but couldn't beat a lifelong addiction to heroin. Includes Parker's only surviving TV appearance playing Hot house.