All Music Guide to Jazz: The Best CDs, Albums & Tapes

The essential reference for anyone who wants to start, expand, or refine a collection of prime jazz recordings.

The "All Music Guide" series (All Music Guide: The Best CDs, Albums, and Tapes, 2d ed., LJ 2/15/95) should garner a warm welcome from serious musicians, jazz enthusiasts, and leisure readers alike with its compendium on jazz. Alphabetically arranged entries include 1150 artist bios and 9000 top recordings rated "best of genre," "finest," and "first picks" by top reviewers. "Music Maps," divided by instrument, artist, and style, guide the peruser through each subject's evolution over the course of the 20th century. Entries also extend coverage to such ephemeral but nonetheless interesting, topics as label histories, clubs and venues, jazz styles, and terms. Well organized, compact, and up-to-date (reflecting 1993 releases), this work represents the best published work of its kind to date. For every library.?Cynthia Ann Cordes, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The All Music Guide is "an ongoing database project" consisting of substantive reviews of different kinds of music. The first volume in the series, The All-Music Guide: The Best CD's, Albums and Tapes [RBB F 1 93], covered a wide variety of music genres. A second edition of that work will be published in February ($24.95, 0-87930-331-X). This new title focuses on 26 styles of jazz--from boogie woogie and bebop to soul jazz and big band. It consists of biographical sketches of about 1,150 jazz artists and groups and reviews and ratings of their best recordings (more than 9,000 records, tapes, and CDs). The book is edited by Ron Wynn, a well-known jazz freelance writer who wrote many of the entries in the book.

The organization of this volume is very similar to that of the first in the series. Introductory material summarizes the 26 styles of jazz covered in the book and defines important jazz terms. The main body of the book consists of entries arranged by musician. Each contains birth and death dates (if applicable), type(s) of jazz played, a biocritical statement, a chronological list of recordings with record label and number and date, and a signed review written by one of the many jazz critics who contributed to this volume. A symbol before each recording indicates the editor's opinion about its importance: "landmark recording," "essential collection recording," and "first-purchase recording."

"Music maps" that mark the chronological development and use of various jazz instruments are interspersed throughout the book. At the end of the volume, there are several appendixes: a directory of record labels with annotations describing the history and development of each, a listing of producers accompanied by biocritical notes, a descriptive list of clubs where jazz musicians regularly performed, an annotated list of jazz periodicals, a list of mail-order sources for jazz recordings, and an unannotated bibliography. The name index includes musicians who are mentioned within entries for other musicians.

The two weaknesses of the series' first volume are also present here--small print and the lack of detailed discographic information for each recording. Nonetheless, this volume is even more valuable than the first because it exclusively focuses on jazz and because the quality of writing and the intelligence of its criticism are uniformly high. It is, as the editor claims, the "most comprehensive reference on jazz recordings and its performers" in print. The All Music Guide to Jazz can be used as a source list to develop a personal collection of recordings or as a beginning resource for research into this intriguing genre of music. It is highly recommended for academic and public libraries.