Tom Piazza Books in Order

This accessible guide traces jazz through its key players, styles, and recordings. Piazza explains what makes the music work while pointing listeners toward essential performances, making it a useful starting place for curious newcomers.

A detailed listening guide to jazz's classic period, organized around major musicians and indispensable recordings. Piazza connects the music's history to practical advice about what to hear in each performance.

Twelve stories move through Memphis, New Orleans, Florida, Texas, New York, and beyond. Piazza follows people facing desire, race, class, storms, family pressure, and bad decisions, with blues and country music shaping the collection's rhythm.

Piazza gathers fifty notable jazz liner notes from the 1940s onward. Written by musicians and critics, the pieces offer recording-room stories, musical context, arguments, and close observations of artists from Duke Ellington to Ornette Coleman.

This collection of essays, profiles, reviews, and criticism considers jazz in the 1980s and 1990s. Piazza writes about musicians, record labels, race, tradition, and the spirited arguments over where the music should go next.

On a magazine assignment, Piazza travels to Nashville to spend time with Jimmy Martin, the self-proclaimed King of Bluegrass. The resulting portrait captures Martin's musical drive, comic bravado, and often difficult life behind the legend.

John Delano, a Connecticut professor known for his unconventional Cold War studies, cannot finish his new book after his father's death. Memories and a search for his estranged brother force him to face family history and the limits of intellectual distance.

A practical introduction for listeners who want to get beyond simply liking jazz. Piazza breaks down blues forms, improvisation, rhythm, swing, and musical storytelling, using recordings to show how the pieces fit together.

Written after Hurricane Katrina, this personal portrait explains what New Orleans gives to American life. Piazza celebrates its music, food, and layered cultures while examining the poverty, racism, corruption, and neglect exposed by the disaster.

As Hurricane Katrina approaches, two New Orleans families make very different choices. Carpenter SJ Williams stays in the Lower Ninth Ward while editor Craig Donaldson evacuates, and the flood scatters both families into an uncertain new life.

Piazza collects essays on American roots music, literature, politics, and post-Katrina New Orleans. Profiles of artists such as Charley Patton, Jimmie Rodgers, Jimmy Martin, and Bob Dylan sit beside writing on books, housing, and public life.

Before the Civil War, a fugitive enslaved man and gifted banjo player joins a struggling minstrel troupe under a dangerous disguise. Pursued by a bounty hunter, he and the performers confront the compromises, masks, and violence built into their world.

In 1883, a young professor convenes an unlikely writers' conference in upstate New York, drawing Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and others. Their comic, combative gathering turns into a debate over democracy, race, gender, art, and America.

A 2018 road trip assignment grew into a friendship and an unfinished memoir project with John Prine. Piazza combines travel, conversations, music criticism, and memories from Prine's final years into an intimate portrait of the songwriter and his world.