- Paperback: 452 pages
- Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 2 edition (May 9, 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0195399706
- ISBN-13: 978-0195399707
Ted Gioia's History of Jazz has been universally hailed as a
classic-acclaimed by jazz critics and fans around the world. Now 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. Here are the
giants of jazz and the great moments of jazz history-Jelly Roll Morton,
Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, cool jazz greats
such as Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, and Lester Young, Charlie Parker and
Dizzy Gillespie's advocacy of modern jazz in the 1940s, Miles Davis's
1955 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, Ornette Coleman's
experiments with atonality, Pat Metheny's visionary extension of
jazz-rock fusion, the contemporary sounds of Wynton Marsalis, and the
post-modernists of the current day. Gioia provides the reader with
lively portraits of these and many other great musicians, intertwined
with vibrant commentary on the music they created. He also evokes the
many worlds of jazz, taking the reader to the swamp lands 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.
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