Books like Monk! by Youssef Daoudi

By drawing on his years as a monk, Jay Shetty shows how to clear mental blocks, find purpose, and live with calm and compassion—practical steps to thrive in everyday life.

This biography celebrates the life and music of a jazz guitar genius whose legend continues to grow today. Best known as a session leader and sideman for Blue Note Records in the '60s - he played on nineteen Blue Note sessions in 1961 - Grant Green helped make jazz guitar playing its own art form. His aggressive, rhythmic tone was simultaneously fluid and eloquent, and he moved freely between traditional bop, blues, gospel, Latin, soul, pop-jazz, and funk. Hitting the spotlight at age 25, Green recorded 93 albums from the early '60s through the late '70s, both as a stellar sideman and a leader. He worked with dozens of jazz greats - Herbie Hancock, Stanley Turrentine, Art Blakey, and many others - but his overall contributions to jazz were sorely underrated during his lifetime. Today, his music is sampled by acid-jazz and hip-hop artists such as Public Enemy, Us[subscript 3], and A Tribe Called Quest, and several tribute albums have been recorded. This unique memoir honors Green's personal spirit and musical brilliance through the eyes of his family, close friends, fellow musicians, Blue Note Records staff, music critics, and loving fans of all kinds. This book also paints a revealing portrait of Green's lesser-known struggles with racial and religious barriers, failed marriages, drugs, and the declining health that led to his death in 1979 at age 43.

Biography of the legendary Ray Charles, a pioneer of soul music combining gospel, jazz, blues, and country influences.

His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of "bebop" and establishing Monk as one of America's greatest composers. Yet throughout much of his life, his musical contribution took a backseat to tales of his reputed behavior. Writers tended to obsess over Monk's hats or his proclivity to dance on stage. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. Now, historian Robin D. G. Kelley brings to light a startlingly different Thelonious Monk- witty, intelligent, generous, politically engaged, brutally honest, and a devoted father and husband. This is the saga of an artist's struggle to "make it" without compromising his musical vision; a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the twentieth century.--From publisher description.

Thelonious Monk is one of jazz's legendary figures, whose life story is shrouded in mystery. In the house trio at Harlem's hip, renowned Minton's Playhouse, he, along with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and drummer Kenny Clarke - and sometimes saxophonist Charlie Parker - helped mold the nascent style of bebop. Monk's compositions 'Round Midnight; Straight, No Chaser; Blue Monk; Misterioso; Rhythm-a-ning; and scores more have become classics in the jazz repertoire. Monk's piano playing was so original that it has been widely emulated and praised, but never equaled. His personal life was also unique, including battles with mental and neurological conditions that finally led to his total, tragic withdrawal from recording an performing years before his death.