harlem

Gather out of Star-Dust: A Harlem Renaissance Album is a tribute to the Harlem Renaissance, a period of tremendous artistic and cultural achievement among African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s, with New York City's Harlem neighborhood at its epicenter. The book is also based on a current exhibit of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Yale University.

"Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one." Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington is an American jazz legend – a talented pianist, a composer of over 1,000 songs, and a bandleader who gained national attention through his orchestra’s appearances at the famed Cotton Club in Harlem. In this book, Ellington tells the stories of his life and career. He describes growing up in Washington, D.C. in the early 1900s, when he dreamed of playing baseball, not the piano. He shares photographs of his beloved parents and other family members and friends who influenced him.

This is a large, thin book with vivid black and white photos throughout. As a young Washington Post reporter covering jazz during the 1930s through 1940s, the author William Gottlieb (1917-2006) took many pictures of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Dizzy Gillespie.  Before he died, he willed for all his photographs to be put in the public domain. This was carried out four years after his death. The Golden Age of Jazz consists of more than two hundred photos and captions, which are visual thrills for jazz fans.