The Jazzmen

From the New York Times bestselling author, Larry Tye, a sweeping and spellbinding portrait of the longtime kings of jazz, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Count Basie who, born within a few years of one another, overcame racist exclusion and violence to become the most popular entertainers on the planet. What is far less known about these groundbreakers is that they were bound not just by their music or even the discrimination that they, like nearly all Black performers of their day, routinely encountered. Each defied and ultimately overcame racial boundaries by opening America’s eyes and souls to the magnificence of their music. In the process they wrote the soundtrack for the American civil rights movement. Based on more than 250 interviews, this exhaustively researched book of music history brings alive the history of Black America in the early-to-mid 1900s through the singular lens of the country’s most gifted, engaging, and enduring African-American musicians of the Big Band era. Paperback 416 Pages 6 x 9 inches