Music Books for Christmas: Something new to listen out for

As the boundaries between musical genres fall, how does the new crop of music books measure up?

An ever-growing army of music lovers is happy to wear several hats at once. Figuratively speaking, the opera-buff's topper can now perch on the hip-hop fan's baseball cap without the listener beneath suffering any sense of contradiction. "Crossover" has triumphed in the way we choose our music – but not, so far, in the way that publishers expect us to read about it. Too many music books still target the specialist, the collector, the completist, without making overtures to fascinated civilians.

No musical tradition has picked up new fans from a broader range of backgrounds lately than the mighty ocean of Cuban sounds. Many of the smart twentysomethings and natty pensioners I've seen dancing together in front of Ruben Gonzalez's piano might want to refer to Isabelle Leymarie's formidably erudite Cuban Fire: the Story of Salsa and Latin Jazz (Continuum, £19.99). Yet this learned chronicle piles up a mountain of valuable data rather than giving us a compelling narrative. Likewise, anyone who has ever melted to Callas singing "Casta Diva" may thirst to know more about Vincenzo Bellini (scandalously neglected at his bicentenary). Bellini: Life, Times, Music by Stelios Galatopoulos (Sanctuary, £19.99) will answer that curiosity, but its detail may drown more than quench. Newcomers might be better off with the crisp summaries and snapshots of Rupert Christiansen's A Pocket Guide to Opera (Faber, £7.99): great value for buffs as much as bluffers.

But a close focus can produce a book to cherish – if it is allied to a voice that reaches out beyond the aficionados. Ashley Kahn proved as much with his excavation of Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, and his new account of John Coltrane's path-breaking album A Love Supreme (Granta, £20) successfully reprises the mix of recording history, musical assessments and rare illustrations. Miles Davis himself is the subject of the year's strongest jazz biography: So What by John Szwed (Heinemann, £18.99). The Yale professor writes shrewdly and cooly about this most elusive of modern masters, and about a life in which restless aesthetic mastery competed with personal chaos. Admirers of Davis, or of any other jazz giant, will find endless hours of pleasure and provocation in the new – sixth – edition of Brian Morton and Richard Cook's wonderful Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD (£20).

Davis grew into something of a cross-over prophet: among the fragments of music history he loved, and used, were Bach's solo cello suites. Thanks to Casals and du Pré, that particular instrument has become a sort of symbol of the spirit in Western art music. Annette Moreau's assured biography of the cello prodigy Emanuel Feuermann (Yale, £20) expertly and movingly recovers the career of this legendary lost maestro who fled Nazi Germany only to die, aged 39, in 1942. It also incorporates a CD of Feuermann's majestic playing.

Van Morrison can almost match Miles Davis in the surly enigma stakes. Clinton Heylin's biography Can You Feel the Silence? (Viking, £18.99) exhaustively marshals the known facts about the Baudelaire of Belfast but (in the manner of earnest rock-biogs) stacks up too many fat chunks of interview like megawatt speakers on a stadium stage. Of course, one indestructible band has turned the obsessive pedantry of fans into part of the show. A Long Strange Trip (Bantam Press, £20) by the official Grateful Dead historian Dennis McNally will delight the sternest Deadhead-banger while it engagingly traces the merry pranksters' progress across nearly 40 years of US social history.

A tombstone to celebrate another glorious bunch of dinosaurs comes in the form of Bill Wyman's scrapbook-cum-diary-cum-archive, Rolling With the Stones (Dorling Kindersley, £30). The authorised version of group history, according to Mick'n'Keith, will arrive before too long. For now, followers will get plenty of satisfaction from this slab of Stones ephemera. In his Mini Rough Guide to Elvis (£6.99), Paul Simpson lays on the Presley trivia with a trowel but, remarkably, packs in perceptive surveys of the King's roots, career and afterlife in this smart stocking-filler.

As a boy, Daniel Barenboim was playing in Buenos Aires before Elvis ever crossed the threshold of the Sun studio in Memphis (how's that for a gear-crunching crossover link?). The great pianist-conductor's updated memoir A Life in Music (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £18.99) soft-pedals the famous turbulences of his private life. He does, however, explore, with insight and freshness, the music he loves and its place in the wider world – including his courageous work to bring young Israeli and Palestinian performers together in harmony.

Another hero of the halls speaks with charm and energy in Alfred Brendel's volume of conversations with Martin Meyer, The Veil of Order (Faber, £25). As a pianist, Brendel has a precious gift for the fusion of aching lyricism with utter lucidity. His dialogues here, covering his singular career and broader musical themes, have the same enthralling blend of demystifying clarity and quiet rapture.

The serene Brendel makes his stable home among the peaks of the European classical repertoire. In violent contrast, the seething swamp of American popular music lies beneath my crossover title of the year. In Where Dead Voices Gather (Cape, £12.99), the hyperactive journalist-scholar Nick Tosches goes in search of a semi-mythical (white) minstrel-cum-bluesman, Emmett Miller. With a wild glee and fine scorn for academic decorum, Tosches glories in the racial and social confusions of American song and performance. His book is as funkily mixed up as the music it adores.