- A concise history of the art form
- The major figures
- Classic works
- An A-to-Z glossary of terms
- Stylistic variations
- Valuable resources for the Curious Listener
- 50 Essential Jazz CDs

In a century of sonic innovation, perhaps no other musical art form has gone through so many transformations and variations, influenced so many disparate artists, and inspired so much passion, as jazz. For the connoisseur, the beginner, the purist, or any Curious Listener, here's your change to discover - or rediscover - the pleasures, the theories, the styles, and the remarkable history of the musical art form of the twentieth century, and to find out where it might be headed in the twenty-first.

The recordings recommended include: Lester Young's Kansas City Sessions, Billie Holiday's Lady Day, Benny Goodman's Live at Carnegie Hall, Erroll Garner's Concert by the Sea, Sonny Rollins's The Bridge, Charlie Parker's Bird and Diz, Ella Fitgerald's Ella in Rome, Dave Brubeck's Time Out, Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, and Ornette Coleman's This is Our Music.

LOREN SCHOENBERG is a noted conductor, saxophonist and author who has appeared internationally and won the 1994 Grammy Award for Best Album Notes. He has recorded several albums with his own big band, and also with Benny Goodman, Benny Carter and Bobby Short. Schoenberg is on the faculties of the Julliard School, the Manhattan School of Music, The New School, Jazz at Lincoln Center's Essentially Ellington Band Director's Academy, and is program director of the Jazz Aspen Snowmass Jazz Colony.

With a foreword by Wynton Marsalis.

CONTENTS: What is Jazz; The Story of Jazz; Varieties of Jazz; Jazz Deconstructed; The Musicians; The Music; Jazz on CD; The Language of Jazz.

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