Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Jazz : An Illustrated History by Ken Burns, Geoffrey C. Ward ISBN: 0-679-76539-5 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 08 October, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.71 (21 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Jazz Did Not End in 1955!
Comment: Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns have produced another handsome book, featuring the same opulent look and feel as their earlier, best selling books on The Civil War and Baseball. Their writing on jazz's early history is outstanding. Burns & Co. have also done a magnificent job of culling the nation's photo archives for rare photos of jazz's most famous founding fathers along with many of its long since forgotten contributors. For me, this alone is worth the price of admission.
The big problem with this book is that it provides, at best, a severely truncated and tendentious history of the music. The (generally crisp) narrative simply peters out about 1955. One chapter gives a cursory overview of several developments in the 1950s. The final chapter covers the remaining 40 years in a slim, almost perfunctory twenty or thirty pages. Perhaps the book should have been titled "Jazz: The First 50 Years."
It appears to me that the authors - both autodidacts in the field of jazz - simply lost their nerve. Writing a jazz history in the years after 1950 admittedly gets harder. The music splits into many competing schools and styles. Much of it is simply harder for the uninitiated to listen to. But this is no excuse to gloss over or ignore the great music and musicians who mean so much to jazz fans born after 1940. (Would you believe that Charles Mingus only merits a piddling sidebar?)
The authors seem to have signed onto the orthodoxy of Wynton Marsalis and his ilk. In a nutshell, this holds that jazz took (multiple) wrong turns in the modern era. It stopped featuring the familiar, danceable, toe-tappable shuffling swing that earned it its original popularity. In other words, modern jazz has turned into a musical dead end. The only hope for its salvation is to return to the earlier swing and bop forms and overlay them with a slightly more complex and refined sensibility. It is not hard to discern within the narrative the heavy hand of critics who comprise this school of thought: Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch, and Wynton himself.
In sum, by embracing a cramped, severely circumscribed definition of jazz, the authors utterly fail to understand (much less elucidate) the modern era in jazz. Free jazz was/is more than just angry black nationalist ranting. Fusion, at its best, was not simply a sell-out to triumphalist rock. (And, no, Miles Davis did not "denature" the music when he plugged in.)
For me, the elegiac tone of this book is both insulting and patronizing. Baseball did not begin to die when the Dodgers left Brooklyn. Neither did jazz when Ornette Coleman whipped out his alto sax in New York City in 1959.
By all means, do buy this beautiful book. Just be aware of the stultifying orthodoxy emanating from each of its glossy pages.
Rating: 5
Summary: Total and complete jazz retrospective.
Comment: It's a shame that jazz isn't as popular a music form as it was from it's beginning to the late 50's. There's something about the syncopation, improvisation, and vocal styling combination that I think is unsurpassed in today's techno, bubblegum pop inundated culture. This book is for both the true jazz aficionado and the jazz amateur. From its New Orleans start to today's foremost jazz artists, Wynton Marsalis and Cassandra Wilson, it's all there. As mentioned in a couple of reviews, the book does give a short shrift to contemporary jazz...I feel that the main reason for that is that jazz, unfortunately, doesn't enjoy near the popularity it did in its hey-day. What you will come away with, however, is a feel for the social, historical, and ethnic backgrounds that shaped jazz as an American art form. These lavish pictures, quotes, and biographies of the greats...Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Count Basie...you know who they are! will captivate you and make you feel as if you have always been a part of this musical phenomenon.
Rating: 5
Summary: Start Here
Comment: As a jazz fan and a professional music retailer, I can recommend this book as a wonderful place to begin one's discovery of jazz or gain more knowledge of the cultural legacy of the music. In conjunction with the excellent video series and a box of cds by the titans written about by Ward, ie. Armstrong, Ellington, Davis, Parker, Holiday, etc., one can have a wonderful adventure either discovering the music for the first time or revisiting and expanding old passions. Those who quibble with its incompleteness run the risk of branding themselves cynics after the fashion of Wilde's definition: "A man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing."
 |
Title: The Oxford Companion to Jazz by Bill Kirchner ISBN: 019512510X Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: October, 2000 List Price(USD): $49.95 |
 |
Title:Ken Burns's Jazz: The Story of American Music ASIN: B000050HVG Publisher: Sony Pub. Date: 14 November, 2000 List Price(USD): $59.98 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $44.99 |
 |
Title:The Best Of Ken Burns Jazz ASIN: B000050HVJ Publisher: Sony Pub. Date: 07 November, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.98 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $12.99 |
 |
Title: The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia ISBN: 019512653X Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: December, 1998 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
 |
Title:Jazz - A Film by Ken Burns ASIN: B00004XQOU Publisher: PBS Home Video Pub. Date: 02 January, 2001 List Price(USD): $199.92 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $179.93 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
