Illustrations and rhyming text celebrate the roots of jazz music.

"In the summer of 1988, twelve-year-old Chuck Bell is sent to stay with his grandparents, where he discovers jazz and basketball and learns more about his family's past." --

A white youth from New York's East 70's discovers that although trumpet technique is not enough to gain entrance to the soul musician's world, friendship with a top jazzman gives him a broader perspective of his environment as well as of the alternatives the future offers.

"What does the perfect song sound like? Normally, Malcolm Kid wouldn't give this type of question the time of day. As a straight B-student with a heart of copper, he is far more concerned with overcoming mediocrity than he is with achieving perfection. But that all changes when he stumbles across the LK-2000--a strange keyboard cursed with the soul of an old jazz musician. Malcolm soon learns that the only way to free this musician's soul is by performing...

"1928. Zora Broussard arrived in New Orleans with not much more than a bag of clothes, a beautiful voice, and a pair of enchanted red shoes. Her magic caused a tragic accident, and now Zora wants to avoid her overbearing aunt and mean-spirited cousins. As a Black woman in the South, music is her only means of escape. When Zora gets the chance to perform in a prominent jazz club, she meets a white pianist named Phillip with magic of his own, including...

"Self-proclaimed teenage philosopher Cordell Wheaton lives in a sleepy, southern town where nothing ever happens; not since his hero, jazz musician John Coltrane, left some seventy years earlier to "follow the sound." Cordy's life has been unraveling since the night his father and his brother, Travis, exploded on each other. The night Travis's addiction transformed him from budding musician into something entirely different. The night Travis took...

"In these freewheeling short stories, vignettes, and sketches that originally appeared in Jazzman magazine, the famed French cartoonist examines not only the genre and its creators but the nature of the subculture. The grumpy festival-goer, the curmudgeonly collector, the anxious auditioner, and many others are his targets. As improvisional as Coltrane and Mingus, Blutch captures the excitement of live performance and of creating and listening to...