Jazz On A Saturday Night (Coretta Scott King Honor Book)
Starred Review.Kindergarten-Grade 4—"Ladies and gents, what a jam this will be—/an evening of jazz immortality!" And how! John Coltrane and Charlie Parker on sax, Thelonious Monk on piano, vocals by Ella Fitzgerald, trumpet by Miles Davis, drums by Max Roach, Stanley Clarke on bass! The audience is captivated and carried along on "a river of melody sketched in dim light" in this rhythmic tribute to traditional jazz. The spreads, graphic-styled paintings rendered in deep matte tones with a suggestion of collage, switch between stage and audience, with swirling background patterns portraying the flow of music. The grow-ing excitement of this jazz extravaganza is perfectly complemented by the joyful rhyming text: "Repeat on the beat/when Max Roach keeps the heat/on his drums, rhythm thrums,/makes you jump in your seat." The first track on the accompa-nying CD is an introduction to jazz. Each instrument in the book is highlighted individually, followed by the second track, a recording of the original song "Jazz on a Saturday Night." The Dillons' lyrics comprise part of the book's text, and the number features each of the instruments riffing solo and then the ensemble jamming together. The book opens with a one-page overview of jazz and concludes with biographical snapshots of the featured musicians. A splendid read-aloud/listen-along multisensory title, Jazz is an interdisciplinary workhorse, perfect for music, art, movement, poetry, so-cial studies, and language-arts classes. Pair it with the Dillons'Rap a Tap Tap: Here's Bojangles, Think of That(Live Oak Media, 2005) for a rhythmic explosion of sight, sound, and word.—Joyce Adams Burner, Hillcrest Library, Prairie Village, KSCopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.