Jazz Music History: Books

'Concise Guide To Jazz' teaches students to appreciate jazz, as well as detailing how jazz originated, how it is made, the major style eras, and the individual styles of 52 historic figures.

Gioia brings his magnificent work completely up-to-date, drawing on the latest research and revisiting virtually every aspect of the music, past and present.Gioia tells the story of jazz as it had never been told before, in a book that brilliantly portrays the legendary jazz players, the breakthrough styles, and the world in which it evolved.

Rich with the voices of musicians, producers, promoters, and others on the scene during the decades following World War II, this book views jazz's evolution through the prism of technological advances, social transformations, changes in the law, economic trends, and much more.

Jazz/Not Jazz explores some of the musicians, concepts, places, and practices which, while deeply connected to established jazz institutions and aesthetics, have rarely appeared in traditional histories of the form.

Bud Powell was not only one of the greatest bebop pianists of all time, he stands as one of the twentieth century's most dynamic and fiercely adventurous musical minds. In this first extended study of the social significance of Powell's place in the American musical landscape, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. shows how the pianist expanded his own artistic horizons and moved his chosen idiom into new realms. Illuminating and multi-layered, The Amazing Bud Powell centralizes Powell's contributions as it details the collision of two vibrant political economies: the discourses of art and the practice of blackness.

No singer has been more mythologized and more misunderstood than jazz legend Billie Holiday. This biography separates fact from fiction to reveal Lady Day in all stages of her short, tragic life.

Glorious Days and Nights is a personal account of the fifty-year career of jazz photographer Herb Snitzer, with a special focus on his years in New York City from 1957 to 1964. This book includes Snitzer's very best jazz photographs. He reveals the essences of the artists, their struggles, joys, and pains.

Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Herbie Nichols, and Jackie McLean—four profoundly different but closely related lives in the bebop business, that peculiar cross-pollination of show business and serious modern jazz that has developed since the bebop revolution of the Forties. In their collective biographies is a microcosm of the contemporary scene for the black American jazz musician.