Jazz - Softcover

DeVeaux, Scott; Giddins, Gary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 039397880X ISBN 13: 9780393978803

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009

Synopsis

A vivid history of jazz in a classroom text by two exceptional authors€”a leading scholar and a respected critic.Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux write with intellectual bite, eloquence, and the passion of unabashed fans. They explain what jazz is, where it came from, how it works, and who created it, all within the broader context of American life and culture.

About this title

About the Author:

Scott DeVeaux is a nationally recognized jazz scholar whose 1997 book The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History won the American Book Award, an ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award, the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society, and the ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Sound Research. He has taught jazz history at the University of Virginia for more than 25 years.

Gary Giddins is the Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He was the Village Voice jazz columnist for over 30 years and remains a preeminent jazz critic who received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, and the Bell Atlantic Award for Visions of Jazz: The First Century in 1998. His other books include Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams: The Early Years, 1903–1940, which won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award and the ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Sound Research; Weatherbird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century; Faces in the Crowd; Natural Selection; Warning Shadows; and biographies of Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. He has won an unparalleled six ASCAP–Deems Taylor Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Peabody Award in Broadcasting.

From Publishers Weekly:

The difficulties of writing cogently about jazz—of discerning musical regularities in a genre built around improvisatory jams, and a narrative thread that transcends haphazard biography—are admirably addressed in this history. Critic Giddins (Bing Crosby) and historian DeVeaux (The Birth of Bebop) have an easier task in the book's first half, which traces jazz's coalescence in New Orleans out of varied strands of black music, its shaping by Armstrong, Ellington and other giants and its efflorescence in the big band era as the soundtrack of the American century. The tune grows unavoidably less catchy as postwar bebop and successor avant-garde tendencies transform jazz into a self-conscious art music epitomized by John Coltrane's existential squawk. (The authors maintain a cordial respect for every strain of modern jazz except Kenny G: There are many things to dislike about smooth jazz—for example, everything, they sputter.) The multimedia work contains moment-by-moment exegeses of classic recordings (2:13: [Artie] Shaw's line climaxes on a dramatic high note) that readers can find on the publisher's Web site, along with study aids. The authors' fluent, engaging treatment mixes scholarly lore and sociocultural analysis with piquant character studies and rapt evocations of musical artistry; the result is a treasure-trove for fans and students alike. Photos. (Oct.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 039397880X
• ISBN 13: 9780393978803
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 619