While other kids were enjoying the head-bashing pleasures of tackle football, a freshly bar mitzvahed Steven Blier was inhaling operas and getting his first taste of accompanying professional singers. Beginning with impromptu piano gigs in the 1960s, Blier ascended to a dazzling career as an...

For many, Kim Gordon is the epitome of cool: vocalist, bassist/guitarist and founding member of Sonic Youth—one of the most successful bands to emerge from the post-punk New York scene—despite being famously reserved. Ten years ago, Gordon distilled that coolness into her groundbreaking memoir, Girl...

Drawn from NPR Music’s acclaimed, groundbreaking series *Turning the Tables*, the definitive book on the vital role of women in music—from Beyoncé to Odetta, Taylor Swift to Joan Baez, Joan Jett to Dolly Parton—featuring archival interviews, essays, photographs, and illustrations. *Turning the...

This is the story of three revolutionary American musicians, the maestro jazzmen who orchestrated the chords that throb at the soul of twentieth-century America. Duke Ellington, the grandson of slaves who was christened Edward Kennedy Ellington, was a man whose story is as layered and nuanced as his...

Born in Sweden in 1964, Neneh Cherry’s father Ahmadu was a musician from Sierra Leone. Her mother, Moki, was a twenty-one-year-old Swedish textile artist. Her parents split up just after Neneh was born, and not long afterwards Moki met and fell in love with acclaimed jazz musician Don Cherry....