Best illustrated books all over the world
Jazz ABZ: An A to Z Collection of Jazz Portraits (Candlewick, 2005) is exactly what the title promises: 26 jazz greats, one for each letter of the alphabet. The words come from Wynton Marsalis, trumpeter, bandleader, and walking encyclopedia of jazz. Instead of writing mini-biographies, he plays with form. Each […]
This book isn’t a straight biography. It’s more like a riff — short bursts of words and pictures that try to catch the feeling of Sun Ra and his music. Raschka shows him as both a boy from Alabama and a man who claimed he came from Saturn, carrying sounds […]
This book tells the story of how Duke Ellington grew from a boy who wasn’t sure he even liked piano into one of the most important figures in jazz. Andrea Davis Pinkney writes in a voice that has rhythm and swing, almost like the music itself, while Brian Pinkney’s pictures […]
Dizzy (2006) is Jonah Winter’s picture-book biography of jazz great Dizzy Gillespie, brought to life with Sean Qualls’s bold, rhythmic art. Winter tells Gillespie’s story with a text that bounces and swings, echoing the playful, unpredictable nature of Dizzy’s music. It isn’t a dry retelling of dates and facts — […]
This book feels more like music than a story. Chris Raschka takes a few simple words — “Charlie Parker played be bop” — and mixes them with playful sounds and rhythms that bounce across the page like a saxophone solo. The text begs to be read out loud, chanted, or […]