April is a busy time for Hannah Swensen and her bakery; the warm weather makes folks in Lake Eden, Minnesota, go wild for something sweet. When Hannah hears that the Cinnamon Roll Six jazz band will be playing at the town's Weekend Jazz Festival, she's more than happy to bake up a generous supply of their namesake confections to welcome the band to town. Before the festival even begins, tragedy strikes when the tour bus overturns. Among those injured...

"Berlin, 1939. The Hot-Time Swingers, a popular German American jazz band, have been forbidden to play live because the Nazis have banned their 'degenerate music.' After escaping to Paris, where they meet Louis Armstrong, the band's brilliant young trumpet-player, Hieronymus Falk, is arrested in a café by the Gestapo. It is June 1940. He is never heard from again. He is twenty years old, a German citizen. And he is black. Berlin, 1992. Falk, now...

Ten-year-old Bud, a motherless boy living in Flint, Michigan, during the Great Depression, escapes a bad foster home and sets out in search of the man he believes to be his father--the renowned bandleader, H.E. Calloway of Grand Rapids.

"Set over the course of three summers, Small Worlds follows Stephen, a first-generation Londoner born to Ghanaian immigrant parents, brother to Ray, and best friend to Adeline. On the cusp of big life changes, Stephen feels pressured to follow a certain track-a university degree, a move out of home-but when he decides instead to follow his first love, music, his world and family fracture in ways he didn't foresee. Now Stephen must find a path and...

After letting his band down by missing rehearsal, Shorty has some serious questions about what it means to be a leader so he hits the New Orleans streets to find some answers.

Louis Armstrong was the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth century and a giant of modern American culture. Offstage he was witty, introspective and unexpectedly complex, a beloved colleague with an explosive temper whose larger-than-life personality was tougher and more sharp-edged than his worshiping fans ever knew. Wall Street Journal arts columnist Terry Teachout has drawn on new sources unavailable to previous biographers, including hundreds...

The first installment in the long-awaited portrait of one of the most talented and influential musicians of the twentieth century. Charlie Parker personified the tortured American artist: a revolutionary performer who used his alto saxophone to create a new music known as bebop even as he wrestled with a drug addiction that would lead to his death at 34. With the wisdom of a jazz scholar, the cultural insights of a social critic, and the narrative...

A brief recounting of the career of this jazz musician in the voice of "Scat Cat Monroe."