Engagingly links the jazz saxophone with its European roots.
This collaboration spotlights the saxophone’s European birth and wide adoption by American jazz musicians.
Adolphe Sax, a 19th-century Belgian instrument maker’s son, both plays and invents instruments. Searching for a new sound—softer than a trumpet, louder than a clarinet—Adolphe tinkers and reassembles until his masterpiece is ready. Belgium’s arbiters reject the new instrument, and Adolphe moves to Paris. While French tastemakers initially pan it, the composer Hector Berlioz champions “le saxophon,” opining, “It cries, sighs, and dreams.” After hard-won integration into French military bands, other European nations adopt it, too. Napoleon III loses France’s war in Mexico accompanied by the instrument’s wails. Florencio Ramos, a musician in a Mexican cavalry band, obtains a sax and settles in New Orleans in 1884. The signature sound of the rechristened “saxophone” spreads there and beyond, inseparable from jazz’s early permutations. (Cline-Ransome avers that after Sidney Bechet picks up the sax, he forsakes his clarinet.) A final spread summarizes jazz’s singular predisposition to musical contagion: “Coleman Hawkins heard Sidney play. / And Lester Young heard Coleman play. / And Charlie Parker heard Lester play.” While the anecdotal narrative adroitly portrays Sax’s perseverance as an innovator, the segue to American jazz gets shorter shrift. Cline-Ransome admirably amends this: Endpapers, a jacket poster, and spot illustrations celebrate over 20 diverse saxophone greats. Rich, sepia-toned spreads showcase the saxophone’s shining complexity.
Engagingly links the jazz saxophone with its European roots. (Informational picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-8234-3702-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute.
Readers bid farewell to a beloved canine character.
Momo is—or was—an adorable and very photogenic border collie owned by author Knapp. The many readers who loved him in the previous half-dozen books are in for a shock with this one. “Momo had died” is the stark reality—and there are no photographs of him here. Instead, Momo has been replaced by a flat cartoonish pastiche with strange, staring round white eyes, inserted into some of Knapp’s photography (which remains appealing, insofar as it can be discerned under the mixed media). Previous books contained few or no words. Unfortunately, virtuosity behind a lens does not guarantee mastery of verse. The art here is accompanied by words that sometimes rhyme but never find a workable or predictable rhythm (“We’d fetch and we’d catch, / we’d run and we’d jump. Every day we found new / games to play”). It’s a pity, because the subject—a pet’s death—is an important one to address with children. Of course, Momo isn’t gone; he can still be found “everywhere” in memories. But alas, he can be found here only in the crude depictions of the darling dog so well known from the earlier books.
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781683693864
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A gleeful game for budding naturalists.
Artfully cropped animal portraits challenge viewers to guess which end they’re seeing.
In what will be a crowd-pleasing and inevitably raucous guessing game, a series of close-up stock photos invite children to call out one of the titular alternatives. A page turn reveals answers and basic facts about each creature backed up by more of the latter in a closing map and table. Some of the posers, like the tail of an okapi or the nose on a proboscis monkey, are easy enough to guess—but the moist nose on a star-nosed mole really does look like an anus, and the false “eyes” on the hind ends of a Cuyaba dwarf frog and a Promethea moth caterpillar will fool many. Better yet, Lavelle saves a kicker for the finale with a glimpse of a small parasitical pearlfish peeking out of a sea cucumber’s rear so that the answer is actually face and butt. “Animal identification can be tricky!” she concludes, noting that many of the features here function as defenses against attack: “In the animal world, sometimes your butt will save your face and your face just might save your butt!” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A gleeful game for budding naturalists. (author’s note) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781728271170
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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