If you’re looking for a holiday present for your favorite music or photography fan, look no further. It’s wintertime, and the giving is easy. Jérôme Brunet’s coffee-table book of our favorite rock and blues musicians has captured moments of greats like Tom Petty, Joe Cocker, James Brown, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Slash, James Cotton, Dr. John, Steve Miller (who wrote the introduction) and…well, you get the drift.

Most of the images are black and white or sepia portraits, and they all capture the emotional thrust of the music so clearly—whether ecstatic or tragic—that I’m sure there have been bar bets placed on what song was being performed when the shutter clicked.

Brunet—French in origin, Canadian in upbringing and Californian by choice—brings two very pivotal photography traditions to his work: Henri Cartier-Bresson and Jim Marshall (whose work often appeared in this magazine). With the French technique of shooting into the source of the light, and Marshall’s knack for capturing over-the-top moments, many of Brunet’s images have already become classics, like the book’s cover photo of B.B. King, or the festival audience perfectly reflected in Leon Russell’s glasses.

The book itself is painstakingly faithful to the original images. I wish there were a different solution for the several two-page spreads, but by-and-large they’re halved at the best place possible. The large majority of the images are black and white, but Brunet softens a number with sepia tones, and desaturates others. Only a small handful are actual full-color photographs, and frankly, I found the lack of color allows the shape and texture of the images to come to the fore; color might be an unwelcome distraction to the intricacy—and the intimacy—of these moments in music history, and the lives of the many artists who gave us those moments.

—Suzanne Cadgène