Jazz: My Music, My People: ALA Notable Children's Book; ALA Recommended Book for Reluctant Young Readers

For this intimate, moody introduction to jazz, Monceaux offers emphatic mixed-media portraits and biographies of favorite musicians. Typically, Monceaux frames a folk-arty picture of a musician with layers of scribbled colors and scrawled details about his or her life. He often bestows such trimmings as buttons, gloves or lace on his subjects' clothing; Charlie Parker himself gets a plastic party horn, Leadbelly a faux guitar, John Coltrane a toy sax. Next to each image appears a brief biography, warmly informed by the author's reflections: Louis Armstrong is described performing a musical eulogy at the New Orleans funeral of Monceaux's uncle; Count Basie regales guests at Monceaux's grandparents' anniversary party at the Starlight Ballroom in Chicago; a Nina Simone tape fortifies Monceaux in 1966, when he was stationed off the Vietnam coast. The text straightforwardly mentions racism, drug abuse, alcoholism and other adult themes. For example, Monceaux compares a Billie Holiday song about a lynching to ``a group of white men [who] drove past me in a car and called me a nigger.'' Monceaux's demonstration of how music influenced his youth and informed his art may well inspire readers to seek heroes of their own. Ages 9-up. (Sept.)