Jazz: Essential Listening

In this vivid history of jazz, a respected critic and a leading scholar capture the excitement of America's unique music with intellectual bite, unprecedented insight, and the passion of unabashed fans. They explain what jazz is, where it came from, and who created it and why, all within the broader context of American life and culture. Emphasizing its African American roots, Jazz traces the history of the music over the last hundred years. From ragtime and blues to the international craze for swing, from the heated protests of the avant-garde to the radical diversity of today's artists, Jazz describes the travails and triumphs of musical innovators struggling for work, respect, and cultural acceptance set against the backdrop of American history, commerce, and politics. With vibrant photographs by legendary jazz chronicler Herman Leonard, Jazz is also an arresting visual history of a century of music.

For use with the music collection The Norton Jazz Recordings; Essential Listening, available separately on 2 CDs or as an Mp3 DVD, this music history and appreciation textbook presents a comprehensive survey of over one hundred years of American jazz. Beginning with a discussion of instruments and jazz form and fundamentals, the work proceeds chronologically from folk traditions of the late nineteenth-century, through New York in the 1920s, the swing and big band eras and into modern, avant-garde and fusion styles. All of the traditional greats are covered, including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. "Listening guide" sections in the work point out key jazz concepts from specific musical passages. The work includes numerous photographs, sidebars and summary sections. Deveaux teaches music at the University of Virginia and Giddins is a jazz critic and professor at City University of New York. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

The #1 text in the market—now in an Essentials Edition.

The #1 text in the market--now in an Essentials Edition.

Jazz: Essential Listening provides all the materials students need to listen to, understand, and love jazz. Written by two master storytellers, this new brief text combines a dynamic listening experience with vivid narrative history, must-hear masterworks, and a superior eMedia package to reveal the excitement of America's quintessential music. Authors Scott DeVeaux and Gary Giddins 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.

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 over twenty-five years.Gary Giddins is a long-time columnist for the Village Voice and 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.