Books like Q by Quincy Jones

A biography of Charlie Parker, tracing his rise from Kansas City’s jazz scene to his groundbreaking bebop career, while noting his struggles with drug addiction and personal relationships.

The Chitlin' Circuit traces the rise of rock 'n' roll in black America, showing how venues and performers like James Brown, B. B. King, and Little Richard honed their craft in the smoky back rooms that birthed a music revolution.

An insider’s account of one of Hollywood’s greatest stars, telling her story from the very beginning through the glamour and excess of the Golden Age of Movies

Quincy Jones (b. 1933) is one of the most prolific composers, arrangers, bandleaders, producers, and humanitarians in American music history and the recording and film industries. Among pop music fans he is perhaps most famous for producing Michael Jackson's album, Thriller. Clarence Bernard Henry focuses on the life, music, career, and legacy of Jones within the social, cultural, historical, and artistic context of American, African American, popular, and world music traditions. Jones's career has spanned over sixty years, generating a substantial body of work with over five hundr.

Billy Strayhorn (1915-1967) was one of the most accomplished composers in the history of American music, the creator of a body of work that includes such standards as "Take the 'A' Train," "Lush Life," and "Something to Live For." Yet all his life Strayhorn was overshadowed by another great composer: his employer, friend, and collaborator, Duke Ellington, with whom he worked as the Ellington Orchestra's ace songwriter and arranger. Lush Life, David Hajdu's sensitive and moving biography of Strayhorn, is a corrective to decades of patchwork scholarship and journalism about this giant of jazz. It is also a vibrant, absorbing account of the "lush life" led by Strayhorn and other jazz musicians in Harlem and Paris. A musical prodigy who began a career as a composer while still a teenager in Pittsburgh, Strayhorn came to New York City at Duke Ellington's invitation in 1939; soon afterward he wrote "'A' Train," which became the signature song of the Ellington Orchestra, one of the most popular jazz bands in the country. For the next three decades, Strayhorn labored under a complex agreement whereby Ellington thrived in the role of public artist to Strayhorn's private one, often taking the bows for Strayhorn's work. Strayhorn was alternately relieved to be kept out of the limelight and frustrated about it. In Harlem and in the cafe society downtown, the small, shy black composer carried himself with singular style and grace as one of the few jazzmen to be openly homosexual. His compositions and elegant arrangements made him a hero to other musicians, but when he died at age fifty-two, his life cut short by alcohol abuse and cancer, few people fully understood the vital role he played in the Ellington Orchestra's development into a vehicle for some of the greatest, most ambitious American music of this century.