Taschen’s Jazz: An Illustrated Portrait of New York in the Roaring Twenties

Band battles, brass classics, Cotton Club etiquette, and how to do the “double roll” like a pro.

“Jazz is the music of the body,” Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary, “…and the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life.” From the fine folks of Taschen (♥) — who have given us such visual gems as the world’s best infographics, the best illustrations from 130 years of Brothers Grimm, Harry Benson’s luminous photos of The Beatles, and the history of menu design — comes Jazz. New York in the Roaring Twenties (public library), a remarkable time-capsule of Gotham’s swinging golden age by music journalist Hans-Jürgen Schaal, edited and gloriously illustrated by German graphic designer, illustrator, and book artist Robert Nippoldt. The lavish large-format volume, which comes with a CD compilation of the era’s most celebrated songs, covers iconic venues like the Cotton Club and the Roseland Ballroom, legendary recording sessions, and the epic “band battles” that dominated the club scene, among other curious and lesser-known facets of the Roaring Twenties.

Also included are illustrated micro-biographies of twenty-four of the era’s greatest icons, alongside little-known and often amusing anecdotes.

But perhaps most delightful of all are the infographic-inspired maps and morphologies of the jazz scene and its geography, technology, and human topography:

Complement Jazz. New York in the Roaring Twenties with Herman Leonard’s rare portraits of jazz icons, W. Eugene Smith’s ambitious Jazz Loft Project, and William Gottlieb’s magnificent photos of jazz greats.

Images courtesy Taschen

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Happy Birthday, Louis Armstrong: What a Wonderful World

Celebrating a timeless voice with a timely message.

Just last month, we commemorated 40 years since the world lost the great Louis Armstrong with Satchmo, the fascinating documentary about his life and legacy. But there’s no reason not to also celebrate his birth, which happens to have taken place exactly 110 years ago today. And there’s hardly a better way to do that than by taking delight in one of his most iconic performances, his remarkable rendition of “What a Wonderful World” — with the added joy of serving up a simple reminder of optimism, amidst a particularly difficult year framed by news of every kind of global tragedy, from environmental disaster to large-scale violence to financial and political disillusionment. Sing it, Lou.

For more on the life and work of the iconic musician, look no further than Terry Teachout’s excellent Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.

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7 (More) Obscure Children’s Books by Famous “Adult” Lit Authors

What a magical car engine has to do with social justice, a parrot named Arturo and the history of jazz.

After the first installment of 7 little-known children’s books by famous authors of “grown-up” literature, on the trails of some favorite children’s books with timeless philosophy for grown-ups, here come seven more, based on reader suggestions and belated findings from the rabbit hole of research surrounding the first installment.

ALDOUS HUXLEY

Aldous Huxley may be best known for his iconic 1932 novel Brave New World, one of the most important meditations on futurism and how technology is changing society ever published, but he was also deeply fascinated by children’s fiction. In 1967, three years after Huxley’s death, Random House released a posthumous volume of the only children’s book he ever wrote, some 23 years earlier. The Crows of Pearblossom tells the story of Mr. and Mrs. Crow, whose eggs never hatch because the Rattlesnake living at the base of their tree keeps eating them. After the 297th eaten egg, the hopeful parents set out to kill the snake and enlist the help of their friend, Mr. Owl, who bakes mud into two stone eggs and paints them to resemble the Crows’ eggs. Upon eating them, the Rattlesnake is in so much pain that he beings to thrash about, tying himself in knots around the branches. Mrs. Crow goes merrily on to hatch “four families of 17 children each,” using the snake “as a clothesline on which to hang the little crows’ diapers.”

The original volume was illustrated by the late Barbara Cooney, but a new edition published this spring features artwork by Sophie Blackall, one of my favorite artists, whose utterly lovely illustrations of Craigslist missed connections you might recall.

GERTRUDE STEIN

Writer, poet and art collector Gertrude Stein is one of the most beloved — and quoted — luminaries of the early 20th century. In 1938, author Margaret Wise Brown of the freshly founded Young Scott Books became obsessed with convincing leading adult authors to try their hands at a children’s book. She sent letters to Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Gertrude Stein. Hemingway and Steinbeck expressed no interest, but Stein surprised Brown by saying she already had a near-complete children’s manuscript titled The World Is Round, and would be happy to have Young Scott bring it to life. Which they did, though not without drama. Stein demanded that the pages be pink, the ink blue, and the artwork by illustrator Francis Rose. Young Scott were able to meet the first two demands despite the technical difficulties, but they didn’t want Rose to illustrate the book and asked Stein to instead choose from several Young Scott illustrators. Reluctantly, she settle don Clement Hurd, whose first illustrated book had appeared just that year. The World Is Round was eventually published, featuring a mix of unpunctuated prose and poetry, with a single illustration for each chapter. The original release included a special edition of 350 slipcase copies autographed by Stein and Hurd.

The wonderful We Too Were Children has the backstory.

JAMES THURBER

In the 1940s and 1950s, celebrated American author and cartoonist James Thurber, best-known for his contributions to The New Yorker, penned a number of book-length fairy tales, some illustrated by acclaimed Catalan-American artist and political cartoonist Marc Simont. The most famous of them was The 13 Clocks — a fantasy tale Thurber wrote in Bermuda in 1950, telling the story of a mysterious prince who must complete a seemingly impossible challenge to free a maiden, Princess Saralinda, from the grip of the evil Duke of Coffin Castle. The eccentric book is riddled with Thurber’s famous wordplay and written in a unique cadenced style, making it a fascinating object of linguistic appreciation and a structural treat for language-lovers of all ages.

For a cherry on top, the current edition features an introduction by none other than Neil Gaiman.

Thanks, stormagnet

CARL SANDBURG

In 1922, nearly two decades before the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes, poet Carl Sandburg wrote a children’s book titled Rootabaga Stories for his three daughters, Margaret, Janet and Helga, nicknamed “Spink”, “Skabootch” and “Swipes,” respectively. Their nicknames occur repeatedly in some of the volume’s whimsical interrelated short stories.

The book arose from Sandburg’s desire to create the then-nonexistent “American fairy tales,” which he saw as integral to American childhood, so he set out to replace the incongruous imagery of European fairy tales with the fictionalized world of the American Midwest, which he called “the Rootabaga country,” substituting farms, trains, and corn fairies for castles, knights and royatly. Equal parts fantastical and thoughtful, the stories captured Sandburg’s romantic, hopeful vision of childhood.

In 1923, Sandburg followed up with a sequel, Rootabaga Pigeons, telling tales of “Big People Now” and “Little People Long Ago.”

Thanks, Rachel

SALMAN RUSHDIE

Indian-British novelist Salman Rushdie has had his share of acclaim and controversy, but one thing that has remained constant over his prolific career is his penchant for the written word. In 1990, he turned his talents to children’s literature with the release of Haroun and the Sea of Stories — a phantasmagorical allegory for a handful of timely social and social justice problems, particularly in India, explored through the young protagonist, Haroun, and his father’s storytelling. The book received a Writer’s Guild Award for Best Children’s Book that year.

One of the book’s unexpected treats is breakdown of the meanings and symbolism of the ample cast of characters’ names, an intriguing linguistic and semantic bridge to Indian culture.

Twenty years later, just last winter, Rushdie followed up with his highly anticipated second children’s book, Luka and the Fire of Life: A Novel.

Thanks, SaVen

IAN FLEMING

Ian Fleming is best-known as the creator of one of the best-selling literary works of all time: the James Bond series. A few years after the birth of his son Caspar in 1952, Fleming decided to write a children’s book for him, but Chitty Chitty Bang Bang didn’t see light of day until 1964, the year Fleming died. It tells the story of the Potts family and the father figure, Caractacus, who uses money from the invention of a special candy to buy and repair a unique, magical former race car, which the family affectionately names Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Fleming’s inspiration came from a series of aero engines built by racing driver and engineer Count Louis Zborowski in the early 1920s, whose first six-cylinder Maybach aero engine was called Chitty Bang Bang.

The original book was beautifully illustrated in black-and-white by John Burningham and was soon adapted into the 1968 classic film of the same name starring Dick Van Dyke.

LANGSTON HUGHES

Prolific poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist Langston Hughes is considered one of the fathers of jazz poetry, a literary art form that emerged in the 1920s and eventually became the foundation for modern hip-hop. In 1954, the 42-year-old Hughes decided to channel his love of jazz into a sort-of-children’s book that educated young readers about the culture he so loved. The First Book of Jazz was born, taking on the ambitious task of being the first-ever children’s book to review American music, and to this day arguably the best. Hughes covered every notable aspect of jazz, from the evolution of its eras to its most celebrated icons to its geography and sub-genres, and made a special point of highlighting the essential role of African-American musicians in the genre’s coming of age. Hughes even covered the technicalities of jazz — rhythm, percussion, improvisation, syncopation,blue notes, harmony — with remarkable eloquence that, rather than overwhelming the young reader, exudes the genuine joy of playing.

Alongside the book, Hughes released a companion record, The Story of Jazz, featuring Hughes’ lively, vivid narration of jazz history in three tracks, each focusing on a distinct element of the genre. You can hear them here.

For more on rare and out-of-print children’s books by famous 20th-century “adult” authors, I really can’t recommend Ariel S. Winter’s beautifully written, rigorously researched We Too Were Children enough.

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(Almost) Everything You Need to Know about Culture in 10 Books

What the limits of the universe have to do with the history of jazz and the secret of happiness.

Last week, I was reorganizing my library and realized that some of my favorite books are ones that introduced me to subjects I either admired but knew little about or was unaware of altogether. The kinds of reads that profoundly enrich one’s lens on the world. So I thought I’d put together a modest reading list of essential primers for, well, everything. Okay, maybe not everything — I’m keenly aware of how laughable that proposition is — but a fair amount to offer a basis for the kind of cross-disciplinary understanding of culture that I believe is crucial to contributing to the world in a meaningful way. To begin, here are ten essential primers on everything from jazz to data visualization to money.

DATA VISUALIZATION

Long before there was The Visual Miscellaneum or Data Flow, there was Graphis diagrams: The graphic visualization of abstract data — a seminal vision for the convergence of aesthetics and information value, originally published in 1974, which codified the conventions of contemporary data visualization and information design. One of the 100 most influential design books of the past 100 years, it features work by icons like legendary designer and animator Saul Bass, Brain Pickings favorite Milton Glaser, TED founder Richard Saul Wurman and many more.

Images courtesy of insect54

JAZZ

As a lover of jazz, I was thrilled for this month’s release of The History of Jazz — Ted Gioia‘s fascinating and ambitious cultural biography of the genre, though such classification is incredibly reductionist, that permeated just about every facet of creative culture, social dynamics and politics.

The idea of a ragtime ballet or opera must have seemed an oxymoron to those on both sides of the great racial divide that characterized turn-of-the-century American society. It required the development of a different aesthetic before such works could be appreciated on their own terms.

In our own day, we have embraced just such a new aesthetic, one that allows audience not only to accept, but often rush to praise, willy-nilly, various transformations of vernacular forms of culture into serious art. This tendency is evident not only — or even primarily — in jazz but in virtually every contemporary genre and style of creative human expression. But even in tolerant, liberal-mined times, the tension between these two streams of activity continues to seethe under the surface. This dynamic interaction, the clash and fusion — of African and European, composition and improvisation, spontaneity and deliberation, the popular and the serious, high and low — will follow us at virtually every turn as we unfold the complex history of jazz music.” ~ Ted Gioia

COSMOLOGY

In 1988, legendary theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking wrote what’s commonly held as the most important book in popular science ever published. A Brief History of Time attempted to answer one of humanity’s most fundamental questions — where did the universe come from? — and tackled the complex subject of cosmology through a multitude of angles, including the Big Bang theory, black holes, high mathematics, the nature of time, gravity and much more, yet did it in a way digestible enough to invite the non-expert reader to consider the universe in an entirely new way. (Eight years later, a fantastic illustrated edition offered a revised, updated and expanded version of the book.) With a foreword by none other than Carl Sagan, the book remains a fundamental sensemaking mechanism for understanding the cosmos, our place in it, how we got there and where we might be going.

Perhaps most powerful of all is the human hope and scientific vision of Hawking’s ending:

If we find [a unified theory], it would be the ultimate triumph — for then we would know the mind of God.”

INFORMATION THEORY

The future of information is something I’m deeply interested in, but no such intellectual exploit is complete without a full understanding of its past. Running the risk of overbeating that drum — since I both reviewed it separately earlier this year and placed it atop my annual summer reading list for 2011 — I still maintain that James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood is the most important and ambitious work in illuminating human communication and media theory since the days of Marshall McLuhan. Gleick illustrates the central dogma of information theory through a riveting journey across African drum languages, the story of the Morse code, the history of the French optical telegraph, and a number of other fascinating facets of humanity’s infinite quest to transmit what matters with ever-greater efficiency.

We know about streaming information, parsing it, sorting it, matching it, and filtering it. Our furniture includes iPods and plasma screens, our skills include texting and Googling, we are endowed, we are expert, so we see information in the foreground. But it has always been there.” ~ James Gleick

But what makes the book truly shine is that, unlike some of his more techno-dystopian contemporaries, Gleick roots his core argument in a certain faith in humanity, in our moral and intellectual capacity for elevation, making the evolution and flood of information an occasion to celebrate new opportunities and expand our limits, rather than to despair over our limitations.

MONEY

In The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson makes a compelling case for banking and the development of currency as a central force behind how civilization has evolved. As we begin to emerge from one of the biggest global recessions in recorded history, Ferguson offers a timely and timeless reminder of one of the greatest truths in financial history and, I would add, human psychology at large: Sooner or later, every bubble bursts. What makes the book even more interesting is that Ferguson completed his research for it prior to the actual economic recession in the U.S., yet many of his insights and conclusions presage what was about to happen with uncanny accuracy.

Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret, and this book sets out to illuminate the most important of these. For example, the Renaissance created such a boom in the market for art and architecture because Italian bankers like the Medici made fortunes by applying Oriental mathematics to money. The Dutch Republic prevailed over the Habsburg Empire because having the world’s first modern stock market was financially preferable to having the world’s biggest silver mine. The problems of the French monarchy could not be resolved without a revolution because a convicted Scots murderer had wrecked the French financial system by unleashing the first stock market bubble and bust.” ~ Niall Ferguson

Above all, the book — one of 5 must-read books by this year’s TED Global speakers and a companion read to a BBC documentary of the same name, now free to watch online — is an admirable effort to break down what Ferguson calls “the dangerous barrier which has arisen between financial knowledge and other kinds of knowledge,” a hallmark of the holistic knowledge and cross-disciplinary curiosity I so firmly believe are the key to a richer, more creative, more intelligent life.

CLASSICAL MUSIC

Classical music is something most people recognize for its cultural importance, but admire from a safe distance. Yet its influence on contemporary culture, both musically and beyond, is wide and all-permeating. In The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross dances across the most essential 20th-century pieces in major and minor with so much grace and eloquence that you emerge with a newfound understanding for and appreciation of the beautiful language of classical music. From Strauss to Mahler to Coltrane to Glass, from politics to technological innovation to art history, Ross offers a biographical, historical and social context for the most elevated soundtrack of the past century and extends an invitation to listen to it with new ears and new heart.

Because composers have infiltrated every aspect of modern existence, their work can be depicted only on the largest possible canvas. The Rest Is Noise chronicles not only the artists themselves but also the politicians, dictators, millionaire patrons, and CEOs who tried to control what music was written; the intellectuals who attempted to adjudicate style; the writers, painters, dancers, and filmmakers who provided companionship on lonely roads of exploration; the audiences who variously reveled in, reviled, or ignored what composers were doing; the technologies that changed how music was made and heard; and the revolutions, hot and cold wars, waves of emigration, and deeper social transformations that reshape the landscape in which composers worked.” ~ Alex Ross

Ross’s sequel, Listen to This, is one of 7 must-read books on music, emotion and the brain.

WRITING

When it was published earlier this year, it didn’t take long to recognize How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by New York Times columnist Stanley Fish as the most important and ambitious work on the art and craft of language since Strunk and White’s iconic 1918 classic, The Elements of Style. In fact, Fish offers an intelligent rebuttal to some of the cultish mandates of Strunk and White’s bible, most notably the blind insistence on brevity and sentence minimalism. To make his case, he picks apart some of history’s most powerful sentences, from Shakespeare to Dickens to Lewis Carroll, using a kind of literary forensics to excavate the essence of beautiful language through its fundamental building block, the sentence.

The pleasure I take in the sentence has nothing to do with the case or with the merits of either the majority’s or the dissent’s arguments. It is the pleasure of appreciating a technical achievement — here the athletic analogy might be to target shooting. […] I carry the sentence around with me as others might carry a precious gem or a fine Swiss watch. I pull it out and look at it. I pull it out and invite others (who are sometimes reluctant) to look at it. I put it under a microscope and examine its innermost workings.” ~ Stanley Fish

FILM

Howard Suber is considered America’s most distinguished film scholar, having founded the UCLA Film Archive and dramatically reformed the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and The Power of Film is nothing short of a remarkable reflection of his reputation and his lifetime of teaching film. In fact, screenwriter David Koepp might not be exaggerating when he says that what Aristotle did for drama, Suber has done for film. The book is essentially a laboratory exploring the patterns, principles and elements of cinematic storytelling that make a film successful, memorable and culturally impactful. And, as Francis Ford Coppola points out about the book, “[m]uch of it is surprisingly contrary to what ‘everyone knows.'”

Popular films are a special kind of drama. While much that is in them can be traced back to the ancient dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, whose works were performed in a kind of popular theater for Athenians, only some of what was true for dramatists and their audiences then continues to be true twenty-five centuries later.

Popular films have their own principles, patterns and structures. These deal not so much with style and technique as with the psychology of storytelling, which ultimately is the psychology of contemporary human beings.” ~ Howard Suber

SCIENCE FICTION

Science fiction is a relatively nascent literary genre, and yet it has become intricately intertwined with much of contemporary culture, from entertainment to design to scientific inquiry to technological innovation. As Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry famously noted in a 1980 letter, “[t]he links between science fiction and science are well-established.” In The Secret History of Science Fiction anthologists James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel offer a fascinating parallel history of the genre born out of an active rebellion against the very term “genre” and a frustration with the multitude of definitions of “science fiction.”

We understand why some might say that, after the mid-1970s, sf went back to the playroom, never to be taken seriously again. But they do a vast disservice to the writers and readers of the next thirty years. What we hope to present in this anthology is an alternative vision of sf from the early 1970s to the present, one in which it becomes evident that the literary potential of sf was not squandered. We offer evidence that the developments of the 1960s and early ’70s have been carried forth, if mostly outside of the public eye. For years they have been overshadowed by popular media sf and best-selling books that cater to the media audience. And at the same time that, on one side of the genre divide, sf was being written at the highest levels of ambition, on the other side, writers came to use the materials of sf for their own purposes, writing fiction that is clearly science fiction, but not identified by that name.”

The book features 19 stories from iconic authors, many not classically considered science fiction writers, including Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Lethem and George Saunders. (It’s also incredibly refreshing to see such a gender-balanced anthology.)

HAPPINESS

Earlier this year, I did an extensive reading list of what I consider to be the 7 most essential books on the art and science of happiness. Topping it was Jonathan Haidt‘s The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, which examines millennia of philosophical thought on the grand question of what makes us happy to unearth ten great theories of happiness discovered by the thinkers of the past. From Plato to Jesus to Buddha, they reveal a surprising abundance of common tangents. (For example, from Shakespeare: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” From Buddha: “Our life is the creation of our mind.”)

Haidt takes this ambitious analysis of philosophical thought over the centuries and examines it through the prism of modern psychology research to paint a profound portrait of our civilization’s understanding of happiness and extract a remarkably compelling blueprint for optimizing the human condition for well-being.

The story begins with an account of how the human mind works. Not a full account, of course, just two ancient truths that must be understood before you can take advantage of modern psychology to improve your life. The first truth is the foundational idea of this book: The mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. Like a rider on the back of an elephant, the conscious, reasoning part of the mind has only limited control of what the elephant does. Nowadays, we know the causes of these divisions, and a few ways to help the rider and the elephant work better as a team.” ~ Jonathan Haidt

* * *

What are the books that gave you new understanding of something or opened your eyes to a facet of culture that had been previously foreign to you?

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