Home » Jazz Articles » Book Review » Jazz
Jazz
Jazz Gary Giddins, Scott DeVeaux
Hardcover; 704 pages
ISBN: 978-0-393-06861-0
W.W.Norton
2009
The only thing harder than playing jazz is writing about it. It is a music that is specific, yet hard to define. It is easy to understand, yet at times hard to comprehend, sometimes in the same song. And it is continuously old and new. In its roughly 100 year history, few books have attempted to capture the culture and complexity of the music.
Marshall Winslow Stearns
b.1908 That plateau will have to make room for the addition of Jazz by 
Gary Giddins
b.1948Comprising 19 chapters, 78 listening guides, a glossary, videography and bibliography—plus the legendary photos of Herman Leonard—the book divides the music into four phases: 1890s - 1920 (genesis), 1920s - 1950s ( from communal music to art), 1950s - 1970s (the modern era) and the fourth stage, 1970s - 2000s (the classical age). The authors strive not to "treat jazz in a vacuum, perpetuating itself as a baton passed from genius to genius (but) rather as a mix of broader, cultural, political, social, and economic factors, and attempt to line up the crucial moments in its progress with historical events that it reflected and influenced."
Even more important than tracing the well-known arc of the music's development through its New Orleans origins, Chicago infancy, Kansas City adolescence and New York adulthood is how Giddins and DeVeaux interweave the extra-musical forces into the mix. The Caribbean tinges that seasoned the music in New Orleans, where the forced marriage of mixed race creoles and blacks provided the final push that birthed the genre; how, to borrow Kenneth Burke's phrase, "antagonistic cooperation" between blacks and whites shows no signs of dissipating soon; and how jazz simultaneously manages to be a classical, popular and folk art. The authors also examine the role of the critic, and do so without falling prey to the factional madness that clouds some jazz writing today.
Of course, Giddins and DeVeaux profile the giants. Trumpeter 
Louis Armstrong
trumpet and vocals
1901 - 1971
Duke Ellington
piano
1899 - 1974
Charlie Parker
saxophone, alto
1920 - 1955
Thelonious Monk
piano
1917 - 1982
Dizzy Gillespie
trumpet
1917 - 1993
Miles Davis
trumpet
1926 - 1991
John Lewis
piano
1920 - 2001
Jason Moran
piano
b.1975
Jazz shows the music as it is, in all of its splendid inventions and dimensions, at the start of the new century. It may be down as far as its presence in the media and the recording industry is concerned, but it has conquered academia, as evidenced by practically obligatory jazz programs in high schools and universities around the world. And in the end, its future is in youthful hands. "Jazz in the twenty-first century may seem no longer rife with the kind of innovators of earlier eras," Giddins and DeVeaux write, "yet it has unquestionably produced one of the best equipped musical generations ever, which has sustained jazz as a singular, stirring, and still surprising art."
Tags
Comments
PREVIOUS / NEXT
Support All About Jazz
All About Jazz has been a pillar of jazz since 1995, championing it as an art form and, more importantly, supporting the musicians who make it. Our enduring commitment has made "AAJ" one of the most culturally important websites of its kind, read by hundreds of thousands of fans, musicians and industry figures every month.
Buy Now
