Jazz

From bebop to New Orleans, from ragtime to boogie, and every style in between, this collection of Walter Dan Myers's energetic and engaging poems, accompanied by Christopher Myers's bright and exhilarating paintings, celebrates different styles of the American art form--jazz. There have been numerous picture books about jazz and jazz history over the last decade, and by and large, the illustrators have fared better than the writers at capturing the spirit of the music in a way that relates to the young. Those attempting to describe the music in verse have encountered particularly rough sledding, many forced either to rely on wild abstraction (Raschka) or to craft poems so complex they exclude all but the most sophisticated young readers (Wynton Marsalis in his recent" Jazz A B Z"). Now, finally, the father-son Myers team has put together an absolutely airtight melding of words and pictures that is perfectly accessible to a younger audience.