"An autobiography of one of the towering figures of contemporary American music and a powerful meditation on history, race, capitalism and art"--

On ordinary days, you could see him. A beautiful boy, but small with a smile given only to lilacs growing between broken sidewalks carrying in his pockets a sound. Before Prince became one of the bestselling musicians of all time, he was a boy named Prince Rogers Nelson. Often overlooked and abandoned, he found his own inspiration in the world around him - teaching himself how to play the guitar, the piano, the drums, and much more. And when he grew...

An astonishingly lyrical biography that rescues Schoenberg from notoriety, restoring him to his rightful place in the pantheon of twentieth-century composers. "In his time, the Austrian American composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) was an international icon. His twelve-tone system was considered the future of music itself. Today, however, leading orchestras rarely play his works, and his name is met with apathy, if not antipathy. With this interpretative...

"For the first time, legendary singer and songwriter and Grammy Hall-of-Famer Aaron Neville tells his personal story of overcoming poverty, racism, addiction, and loss through faith, family, and music"--

"A picture book biography of Mary Lou Williams, an American jazz pianist and composer who wrote hundreds of compositions, recorded hundreds of songs, and wrote arrangements for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, and is an artist often overlooked in the canon of American music because of her gender and skin color"--