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Is Jazz Dead? (Or Has It Moved To A New Address)
open our order pageStuart Nicholson
Routledge, 2005
Paperback. 286pp
£12.99

Is Jazz Dead? (Or Has It Moved To A New Address)Is Jazz Dead? (Or Has It Moved To A New Address) examines the state of jazz in America at the turn of the twenty-first century. In a recent ten-part documentary on Public Television, Ken Burns spent eight out of ten programmes on jazz before World War II; controversially dealing with the last five decades of creative work in the United States in the final episode. Musicians themselves are returning to New Orleans, swing, and bebop styles, while the work of the 1960s avant-garde and even 1970s and 1980s jazz-rock is roundly ignored. Meanwhile, global jazz musicians are creating new and exciting music that is just starting to be heard in the United States, offering a viable alternative to what man critics see as rampant conservatism here.

This book is bound to be controversial among jazz's purists and ideologues, but will be welcomed by others as a celebration of renewal within the global jazz community. In looking at developments outside the United States, Is Jazz Dead? (Or Has It Moved To a New Address) will undoubtedly prompt discussion on how the music should be preserved within it, daring to ask the question on all jazz fans' minds: can jazz survive as a living medium? And, if so, how?

CONTENTS:
1. Where Do We Go From Here? The Jazz Mainstream 1990 to 2005
2. Between Image and Artistry: The Wynton Marsalis Phenomenon
3. Prophets Looking Backward: Jazz At Lincoln Center
4. Deja Vu Time All Over Again: Jazz Singers and Nu-Crooners
5. Teachers Teaching Teachers: Jazz Education
6. Altered Realities and Fresh Possibilities: Future Jazz
7. Out of Sight and Out of Mind: Jazz in the Global Village
8. Celebrating the Glocal: The Nordic Tone In Jazz
9. A Question of Survival: Marketplace or Subsidy

STUART NICHOLSON is an award-winning author of several best-selling books on jazz that have been translated into several languages, including Reminiscing in Tempo: A Portrait of Duke Ellington, Jazz-Rock: A History, Billie Holiday: A Biography, Ella Fitzgerald: A Biography and Jazz: The 1980s Resurgence. He writes regularly for leading American and European newspapers and jazz journals.

"Stuart Nicholson may be the most perceptive critic writing about jazz today. He listens widely - hunting down the most exciting development in improvisational music from Oslo to Patagonia - and hears deeply." - TED GIOIA, author of The History of Jazz

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FURTHER READING

Innovations In British Jazz by John Wickes
Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Europe's Reinvention of Jazz by Mike Heffley
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