Ted Gioia
Oxford University Press, 1997
Hardback. 479pp. b&w illustrations
£19.99

Jazz is the most colourful and varied art form in the world, and it was born in one of the most colourful and varied cities, New Orleans. From the seed first planted by slave dances held in Congo Square and nurtured by early ensembles led by Buddy Bolden and Joe "King" Oliver, jazz began its long, winding odyssey across America and around the world, giving flower to a thousand different forms - swing, bebop, cool jazz, jazz-rock fusion - and a thousand great musicians. In The History of Jazz Ted Gioia tells the story of this music and portrays the legendary jazz players, the breakthrough styles, and the world in which jazz evolved.

Here are the giants of jazz and the great moments of jazz history - Jelly Roll Morton ('the world's greatest hot tune writer'), Louis Armstrong (whose Okeh recordings of the mid-1920s still stand as one of the most significant bodies of work that jazz has produced), Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, cool jazz greats such as Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, and Lester Young, Miles Davis's 1955 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, Ornette Coleman's experiments with atonality, Charlie Parker's surgical precision, Pat Metheny's visionary extension of jazz-rock fusion, the contemporary sounds of Wynton Marsalis, and the post-modernists of the Knitting Factory. Gioia provides the reader with vivid portraits of these and many other great musicians, intertwined with lively commentary on the music they created. Gioia also evokes the many worlds of jazz, taking the reader to the swamplands of the Mississippi Delta, the bawdy houses of New Orleans, the rent parties of Harlem, the speakeasies of Chicago during the Jazz Age, the after-hours spots of corrupt Kansas City, the Cotton Club, the Savoy, and the other locales where the history of jazz was made. And as he traces the spread of this protean form, Gioia provides much insight into the social context in which the music was born. He shows how the development of technology helped promote the growth of jazz - how ragtime blossomed hand-in-hand with the spread of parlour and player pianos, and how jazz rode the growing popularity of the record industry in the 1920s. We also discover how bebop grew out of the racial unrest of the 19940s and 1950s, when black players, no longer content with being 'entertainers', wanted to be recognized as practitioners of a serious musical form.

Jazz is a chameleon art, delighting us with the ease and rapidity with which it changes colours. Now, in Ted Gioia's The History of Jazz, we have at last a book that captures all these colours on one glorious palette. Knowledgeable, vibrant, and comprehensive, it is among the small group of books that can truly be called classics of jazz literature.

TED GIOIA is a critic, historian, pianist, composer, and record producer. He is the author of The Imperfect Art, winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, and West Coast Jazz.

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