Why Jazz?: A Concise Guide - Hardcover

Whitehead, Kevin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199731187 ISBN 13: 9780199731183

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2011

Synopsis

Why Jazz? is a Q&A handbook for novice listeners, a concise history of jazz's major figures and trends, and a plain-English guide to many musical techniques. As in his jazz reviews for NPR's Fresh Air, Whitehead crams a lot of information into compact, accessible prose.

About this title

About the Author

Kevin Whitehead is the longtime jazz critic for National Public Radio's "Fresh Air" and has written about jazz for many publications, including the Chicago Sun-Times, Down Beat, and the Village Voice. He is the author of New Dutch Swing (1998), and his essays have appeared in such collections as Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006, Jazz: The First Century, and The Cartoon Music Book.

Reviews

Whitehead delivers a survey of the genre that’s painfully simple for even the casual jazz fan but readable enough to pull in neophytes, especially those who catch Whitehead’s jazz reviews on NPR’s Fresh Air. The information—a brief tutorial on how the music works, followed by a historical survey of jazz—is delivered in bite-size pieces presented in Q&A format. Sample questions: “What material do jazz musicians play?” “What is stride piano?” “What is cool jazz?” “How are modern jazz musicians educated?” If the questions are simplistic, Whitehead still covers a lot of bases: jazz theory, origins of the genre, seminal figures, subgenres, and, helpfully, “postmodern” jazz. A nice, light primer that might be useful as collateral reading for beginning jazz-appreciation classes. --Alan Moores

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0199731187
• ISBN 13: 9780199731183
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 172