Fifteen top books about jazz

Ed Simon is a staff writer for Lit Hub, the editor of Belt Magazine, and the author of numerous books, including most recently Heaven, Hell and Paradise Lost, Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology, and Relic, part of the Object Lessons series.

In the summer of 2024 Melville House will release his Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, the first comprehensive, popular account of that subject.

At Lit Hub Simon tagged fifteen "literary works with jazz at their center which have given 'special overtones' to words." One title on the list:

Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues

Drawing from the historical “Rhineland Bastards,” mixed race children the result of Black Allied troops stationed in Germany following the Great War, the Ghanese-Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues invents the story of Hieronymus “Hiero” Falk, a brilliant musician who performs swing in Weimar Germany, all of his music being lost when the Nazis come to power. With shades of the great Romani guitarist Django Reinhardt or of the so-called “Swing Kids” who protested fascism through jazz, Edugyan’s novel expresses an inviolate truth about this music.

That truth is that in its cacophony and beauty, its elegance and its joyfulness, jazz is the music of democracy, of liberation, of freedom.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue