Living with Music is a collection of insightful, masterful jazz writings from the musician-turned-writer Ralph Ellison. To him jazz was like poetry, as he pointed out in “On Bird, Bird-Watching, and Jazz,” a piece on Charlie Parker: “Consider that at least as early as T.S. Eliot’s creation of a new aesthetic for poetry through the artful juxtapositioning of earlier styles, Louis Armstrong, way down the river in New Orleans, was working out a similar technique for jazz.”

In “Homage to Duke Ellington on His Birthday,” Ellison skillfully captured the essence of Ellington’s nickname in one sentence: “Somewhere during his childhood a friend had nicknamed Edward Kennedy Ellington ‘Duke,’ and he had proceeded to create for himself a kingdom of sound and rhythm that has remained impregnable to the fluctuations of fad and novelty, even the passing on of key members of his band.” Isn’t that just beautiful?

Ellison also had no problem speaking with eloquentness when disagreeing with another critic. In “Blue People,” Ellison corrected Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) for making an erroneous differentiation of the blues: “Jones makes a distinction between classic and country blues, the one being entertainment and the other folklore. But the distinction is false. Classic blues were both entertainment and a form of folklore. When they were sung professionally in theaters, they were entertainment; when danced to in the form of recordings or used as a means of transmitting the traditional verses and their wisdom, they were folklore. There are levels of time and function involved here, and the blues which might be used in one place as entertainment (as gospel music is now being used in night clubs and on theater stages) might be put to a ritual use in another. Bessie Smith might have been a ‘blue queens’ to society at large, but within the tighter Negro community where the blues where part of a total way of life, and a major expression of an attitude toward life, she was a priestess, a celebrant who affirmed the values of the group and man’s ability to deal with chaos.”

If that kind of thorough comprehension doesn’t prove Ellison was living with the music, I don’t know what is. He truly meant every word when he said, “In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.”

In the introduction, the author Paulo Coelho declares that The Alchemist has sold more than twenty million copies worldwide. Even Bill Clinton read it and Julia Roberts adored it, yet he honestly doesn’t know “What’s the secret behind such a huge success?” After fallen for the hype and read the entire book, I really don’t know either. The story is about a shepherd boy who sets out to search for his “Personal Legend” and along the way he falls in love with any women that would talk to him or look at him. What the book tries to point out is to trust your own heart. It sounds more like a self motivation than a novel.

I was in Las Vegas’s Barnes & Noble looking for a book to kill my flight time back to New York. I encountered David Sedaris’s Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim on a bargain table and decided immediately it was the book to accompany me after reading the following passage:

Lauren was Walt’s sister, who was born prematurely and lived for less than two days. This had happened before the Winterses moved onto our street, but it wasn’t any kind of secret, and you weren’t suppose to flinch upon hearing the girl’s name. The baby had died too soon to pose for photographs, but still she was regarded as a full-fledged member of the family. She had a Christmas stocking the size of a mitten, and they even threw her annual birthday party, a fact that my mother found especially creepy. “Let’s hope she don’t invite us,” she said. “I mean, Jesus, how do you shop for a dead baby.”

Because of his articulate writing, he could make his dark humors lid up. With a collection of 27 essays, Sadaris takes us into the eccentric stories of his family. The book sure helped me get through the three-hour delay from Chicago to New York. This is definitely a perfect traveling read.

In the concise biographical chapter of Lester Young, jazz scholar Lewis Porter emphasizes that the language used by one of the best saxophonists of his time was, “sprinkled generously with four-letter words,” but never offensive. As quoted in Reverend John Gensel’s statement, “Lester’s flow of obscenity was magnificent. Nor was it really obscene, because it was not aggressive and was said as his personal poetry. No one, surely, but Prez could say ‘mother-fucker’ like music, bending the tones until it was a blues.” As for his music, Young was an original artist. At the time when jazz musicians were under the spell of Coleman Hawkins, Young leaped into the jazz scene with a style of his own. To prove the distinction between the two tenor saxophonists, Porter points out that Hawkins had “a rich, guttural tone, a wide, fast vibrato, and a stunning command of his instrument” while Young had “a softer tone and more legato articulation until, by 1939, he had developed the famous ethereal, feathery quality that inspired Stan Gets, Zoot Sims, and thousands of other musicians.” As always, Porter’s meticulous technical details are both pleasure and insightful to read.

Practice makes perfect. With John Coltrane, practice made him a world-renowned jazz legend. In John Coltrane: His Life and Music, a remarkable biography on one of the best jazz saxophonists of the twentieth century, Lewis Porter delves deep into the development of Coltrane’s music and how his obsessions with practice refined his style as he moved from bebop to avant garde. On the life portion, Porter traces all the way back to southern roots to show how Coltrane was named after a Scottish ancestor. On the musical part, Porter’s meticulous and accessible analysis of Coltrane’s accomplishments, including My Favorite Things, Giant Steps, Kind of Blue (his contribution to Miles Davis), and his most famous suit A Love Supreme, through note and scale demonstrations makes the book both fascinating and informing to read. If you have loved Coltrane’s works, you’ll appreciate them even further after reading this book.

Originally written in German by a jazz journalist Thomas Fitterling, Thelonious Monk: His Life and Music is divided into three parts. The first part on Monk’s life is rather brief since Monk was an introvert who lived in his own world and could go on for days without speaking. The only language he would speak was his music. Because of his strange personality, Monk’s music reflected his idiosyncratic character. His style was full of angularity and way far from the standard sound of bebop. Beside his original compositions—”Epistrophy,” “Straight, No Chaser,” “Well, You Needn’t,” “Bemsha Swing,” “Blue Monk,” “Brilliant Corner,” “Crepuscule With Nellie” (a hymn for his wife), “Criss Cross,” which became jazz standards—Monk’s recompositional technique made him an unmistakable ballad player. Monk’s catalog, the third part of the book, featured Fitterling’s listening guides to Monk music. Although his writing is a bit technical, it would be helpful if you have the albums to accompany his commentary. This book is a pleasurable reading material if you would like to learn about Monk.

In “White America,” a song from Slim Shady’s The Eminem Show, he raised a question: “Sitting back looking at shit, wow, I’m like… my skin… Is it starting to work to my benefit now?” No Em, your skin has benefited from black art and culture for years according to essays, poems and a conversation in Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture edited by Greg Tate. In the book intro, Tate points out:

Readers of Black music history are often stuck by the egregious turns of public relations puffery that saw Paul Whiteman crowned the King of Swing in the 1920s, Benny Goodman anointed the King of Jazz in the 1930s, Elvis Presley propped up as the King of Rock and Roll in the 1950s, and Eric Clapton awarded the title of the world’s greatest guitar player (ostensibly of the blues) in the 1960s. Whatever Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Chuck Berry, B. B. King, and other African-American pioneers thought about these coronations, they seem to have wisely kept between pursed lips—at least until Little Richard declared himself “the architect of rock and roll” rather than announce the winner at a late-eighties Grammy Awards ceremony.

Then in “The New White Negro,” Carl Hancock Rux chops up Em with quite a sharp blade:

Rappers Big Boi and Dre may go by the moniker Outkast, but Eminem proves that a real outcast has got to do more than make Miss Jackson’s daughter cry—you got to fuck the bitch, kill the bitch, dump the bitch’s dead body in the river, and not apologize for any of it.

It gets mad brutal:

Niggaz may talk bad about bitches and they baby’s mama—Eminem brutally murders his. Niggaz may have issues regarding absent fathers or dysfunctional mothers—Eminem comically exposes their dysfunctions, and hangs his mother’s pussy high up on a wall for all the world to see. Niggaz may be misogynist, may boast of sexual superiority and sexual indiscretions with a multitude of women, may commonly relegate women to just another piece of ass prime for the taking status—but Eminem drugs the bitch, fucks the bitch, moves on to the next bitch.

Welcome to the surrealistic world of Eminem! Like Sir Elton John alleviated us that we shouldn’t “take him seriously.”

Back in January 2004, I kicked off Visualgui.com with a post on Universal Principles of Design in which I reprinted a handful of principles that apply toward Web design. Since then the post has been mentioned on designer’s blogs around the world, yet it takes three years later to see a book on Principles of Beautiful Web Design.

Unlike Universal, Beautiful Web Design is brief with only five chapters focusing on layout and composition, color, texture, typography and imagery. No CSS, XHTML or Photoshop tutorials can be found in this book, but Jason Beaird (the author) gives plenty sites’ screenshots and brief explanation of the designs to illustrate how the principles have been applied.

Beautiful Web Design is, no doubt, a great book for the novice. If nothing else, the least what the book could do is steering you away from designing horrendous Web sites. Visual aesthetics, however, is only half of the web game. CSS and XHTML are equally important. I am not suggesting that this book should include the technical aspects, but you’re not getting a bang for your buck for its pricy cost ($39.95)—unless you could get a discount from Amazon, which is 34% off as of this writing.

For a book that teaches you to stay creative, the horrendous illustration and typography on the cover of Curt Cloninger’s Hot-Wiring Your Creative Process do the opposite. But don’t let the design of the book throws you off. Cloninger has enough useful materials, including guides to creative process, bypass your inertia, draw inspiration from art and design history, and unblock your imagination. One of the activities he recommends that I also encourage is to maintain a personal design playground in order to keep your motivation moving.

Like the world would really need another book on Miles Davis, Richard Cook, editor of Jazz Review, cleverly stirred his It’s About That Time: Miles Davis On and Off Record away from being another hagiography. Begin with Birth of the Cool and end with posthumous Doo Bop, Cook’s ingenious assessment of Miles’s music and life is based on his albums. What makes this book rewarding is Cook’s meticulous evaluation of the recordings. It takes me longer to read because I have to pause and listen to the albums (only the ones that I own) to appreciate the level of details and the liveliness in his writing. Without being too technical, Cook’s vivid language will help readers understand the aesthetic qualities and beauties of Miles’s works of art.