A sumptuous collection of visual jazz history.
A tribute to “one of the architects of jazz.”
This is the first-ever collection that showcases Schlitten’s incredible career as a legendary jazz producer, photographer of jazz artists, and album-cover designer. The book includes rare black-and-white and color photos of jazz greats, 25 album covers that he designed, a biographical essay by jazz journalist Ted Panken, and an introduction by the acclaimed record producer Zev Feldman—not to mention a Harvey Pekar American Splendor comic riff of Schlitten from 1991. For jazz lovers, this is bounty indeed. Panken goes into great detail chronicling Schlitten’s career, describing specific jazz sessions that Schlitten, born in 1932, attended and photographed, like his early shoot of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane in 1957. As more of his production work was recognized, he took on all kinds of significant projects. He became involved in bringing back old recordings from the 1930s and ’40s for new audiences. In the 1970s, he started his own label, Xanadu, releasing 111 albums, paying royalties whenever he could. Schlitten’s second wife, Nina, urged him to form the label. “Start your own company; I’ll work with you,” she said. “So we started it with $10,000,” Schlitten recalls. “She did all the legal work, did all the secretarial work, and got up early in the morning to pack records, if we were lucky.” One of Schlitten’s final Xanadu productions was Billy Eckstine—I Want to Talk About You: Original 1940-1945 Recordings. Among the book’s many photos is a moody black-and-white image of Coltrane, Monk, and Shadow Wilson performing in 1957. And there’s one of Sonny Rollins and his sax at the Art Gallery. Also featured are Mahalia Jackson, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Ron Carter, and Frank Sinatra. As Feldman writes, Schlitten “witnessed history being made on a nightly basis.”
A sumptuous collection of visual jazz history.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9798875000645
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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