The Best Music Books for Kids

A little frog takes her new drum into the forest and comes home leading a parade.

A New Orleans boy finds a trombone twice his size and grows into the musician he imagined.

A Cuban girl keeps dreaming of drums even when tradition says girls may not play them.

A trombone begins alone, and the orchestra grows one instrument—and one number—at a time.

One piece of music begins a chain of small chances that eventually puts a new composer onstage.

Children in a landfill town make an orchestra from oil drums, forks, and packing crates.

A bright first tour of the ways music can move, feel, gather people, and fill a room.

Chris Raschka turns Charlie Parker’s bebop into syllables, brushstrokes, and one waiting cat.

A girl hears a beat in the park, then finds it in her hands, hips, feet, and heart.

A solitary mole practices the violin underground, unaware of what his music is doing above.

Melba Liston picks the biggest brass instrument in the shop and refuses to be kept out of the band.

A bear finds a piano in the forest, earns a city audience, and wonders what success has cost him.

A Mexican American middle schooler starts a punk band and makes a zine-sized place for herself.

A grieving boy takes his harmonica into the New York subway in search of his grandfather’s blues band.

One harmonica passes through three children’s lives and carries their separate stories toward the same concert.