Books in the Bayou Jazz Lives S. series

This is a selection of jazz guitarist, banjoist, singer and composer, Danny Barker's writings (beginning with a long portrait of Buddy Bolden, the "first man of jazz") drawn from conversations and interviews with the generation of jazzmen that invented the music.

One of the world's great tenor saxophonists, Sonny Rollins has always been committed to the fundamental truths of jazz, especially swing. He has managed to be consistently experimental and forward-looking, and he has recorded at least a dozen essential albums. Here, Richard Palmer charts Rollins's career in full.

Pianist George Shearing, a European jazz musician who in 1947 emigrated to the US and started his landmark series of records with his quintet as well as performing classical pieces with several leading symphony orchestras.

As the handsome (and much-married) leader of a series of big bands and small groups in the 1930s and 1940s, clarinetist Artie Shaw achieved measures of fame and fortune that temporarily eclipsed those of his great rival, Benny Goodman.

Teddy Wilson worked with innumerable great names of jazz. He came to fame in the small groups led by Benny Goodman, and also through his remarkable series of recordings with the singer Billie Holiday. This biography is a candid account of Wilson's life and career.

Marshal Royal was at the core of the Count Basie Orchestra for 20 years during its resurgence in the 1950s and 1960s. Before that he was a pioneer of jazz on the West Coast of the US. His memoirs provide a document of the history of jazz on the West Coast and the development of big band jazz.

This memoir by the internationally renowned jazz pianist Art Hodes, born in Russia in 1904, is in its own way a blues, a lament for and a celebration of music and musicians we have lost. The last of the living legends among Chicago jazz musicians, Hodes joins with jazz historian Chadwick Hansen to provide a unique perspective on more than seven decades of jazz history. With an honesty not usually found in jazz books, Hot Man captures Hodes's professional career from his apprenticeship in Chicago in the 1920s to the present. The book offers remarkable inside views of gangster clubowners, the great New York jazz clubs and the vicious "jazz wars" of the 1940s, Chicago from the 1950s, the very closed and special world of jazz musicians, the curious relationships between musicians and their audiences, and Hodes's experiences with jazz greats including Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke. No other white musician has given us such a full account of learning to play from black musicians. This intimate journey takes us to a vast circle of fellow musicians, to recording companies and the business of the profession, to Nodes's other career as a writer and editor of the Jazz Record, a publication that existed through most of the 1940s. Hodes's story includes almost thirty photographs and a comprehensive discography, filling a gap in the world of jazz literature.