Jazz ABZ

April is National Poetry Month

Marsalis, Wynton. Jazz ABZ: An A to Z Collection of Jazz Portraits. Illustrated by Paul Rogers. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 2005.

Extraordinary hardly covers it for this creative combination of poetry and painting. Structured as an alphabet book, it is also an introduction to the great jazz artists of the twentieth century in words and stunning portraits. For each letter of the alphabet, Marsalis has written a poem in praise of a jazz musician, from Louis Armstrong to Count Basie all the way to DiZZy Gillespie. For each musician, Marsalis has chosen a different type of poem: an ode for Jelly Roll Morton, a lyric poem for Billie Holiday, a sonnet for Sarah Vaughn, and so on. Some are easy to read, others quite difficult. Explanations of the forms appear at the end of the book, as do biographical summaries of each musician that will give readers basic facts to help them decipher some of the more obscure meanings or references in the poems. Originating from the desire of artist and illustrator Paul Rogers to celebrate the jazz musicians he’s admired all his life, this book is a fittingly creative tribute to those musicians and the creative art form that is jazz.

 

http://www.worldcat.org/title/jazz-a-b-z-a-collection-of-jazz-portraits-from-a-to-z/oclc/851540324&referer=brief_results

In celebration of Women's History Month:

Robinson, Fiona. Ada’s Ideas: The Story of Ada Lovelace, the World’s First Computer Programmer. New York: Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2016.

 Ada Lovelace was born into a world of “poetry and parallelograms” as the daughter of the poet Lord Byron and his mathematician wife, Anne Milbank. She was fascinated by the evolving technology of her day, including Charles Babbage’s “difference machine,” an early calculator, and the looms that produced Jacquard fabrics according to a “program,” or set of controlling directions. She believed that such devices could be “programmed” to “create pictures, music and words.” Sadly, Ada died at age 36, but the mathematicians who built the early computers in the mid-20^th century knew about her and consulted the drawings and calculations found in her notebooks as they created the machines she had imagined a century earlier. Poetry and parallelograms indeed.