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| Jazz: A History of America's Music |  | Author: Burns, Geoffrey, Ken Ward
Publisher: audible.com
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $15.73
You Save: $14.22 (47%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  25 reviews
Media: Audio Download
ASIN: B00005AAPN
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Amazon.com Review
First off, let's get the kudos down: Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns deserve far more than simple gratitude for bringing jazz to the limelight with this lavishly illustrated volume. The book features among its 500-plus pictures many of the previously unseen shots of musicians and venues glimpsed in Burns's 10-part documentary, Jazz. (See our Ken Burns Jazz Store for the lowdown on the series.) Jazz: An Illustrated History follows the film episode by episode, and it's filled with rich historical detail in the early chapters. Like the series, however, the book trails off after a certain point in chronicling jazz's history. It gives background aplenty on early New Orleans music, the migration of jazz up the Mississippi to major urban centers, and the developments of swing and bebop. After bebop, the history gets a bit perfunctory. Dozens of major figures get mere sidebar coverage. Little is said of substance on Latin or Brazilian jazz, European contributions to the music, fusion, or umpteen smaller deviations from the mainstream. There are wonderful essays that highlight elements of jazz culture, particularly Gerald Early's consideration of race and white musicians in jazz and Gary Giddins's five-page essay on avant jazz. And there are fine sidebars as well. But developments during and after the 1960s are dealt with primarily in impressionistic guest essays rather than detail-oriented historical narrative. It is, of course, difficult to capture all jazz history in any single volume. So perhaps this ought to have been called Jazz: A Historical Appreciation, since the hundreds of images certainly create an intense sense of the music's milieu. --Andrew Bartlett
Product Description
Read by LeVar Burton
6 cassettes/ 9 hours
Continuing in the tradition of their previous, critically acclaimed collaborations, Ken Burns and Geoffrey Ward now bring us the history of the quintessential and first indigenous American music.This dynamic and powerful narrative is brought to life by the remarkable men and women who have made their mark on the music and left a lasting imprint on our culture.In words, we meet these larger-than-life personalities, including Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Bix Biederbecke, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Sara Vaughan, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, and many more.Essays by Winton Marsalis, Dan Morgenstern, Gerald Early, Stanley Crouch, and Gary Giddins put the evolution of jazz in historical and cultural context.Jazz, like the music itself is an exploration of the American experience.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
 Best for Nostalgia Buffs August 26, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
If you've seen the PBS miniseries "Ken Burns: Jazz" you'll know exactly what you are getting into.
This oversized, photograph-laden text concentrates almost exclusively on two periods of Jazz' history - the 1920s variety and Swing. These were also Jazz' glory days as million-selling popular music and it's impossible to look at the photos in this book without also marvelling at the wonderful cityscapes and beautiful vintage fashions. There was a stylish classiness about the look of the 1930s and 1940s that still towers over almost anything since. Immersing yourself in these photographs and listening to some choice Jazz CDs from the era is the next best thing to a time machine.
This book is also a labor of love for both Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, two equally important but very different titans in Jazz of this time period. I love the music of both men, and the huge sections devoted in each chapter to both of them is a welcome antidote to the relative lack of attention they currently receive in other media nowadays.
Why I have I given this book a mediocre rating?
Ken Burns is a historian, which means that his interests lie primarily in the past. Burns focuses almost exclusively on pre-1950s Jazz. This would not be such a bad thing if the book ended the story with, perhaps, the end of the Korean War. Burns, however, makes an attempt to cover the more modern era in Jazz to disasterous result. The development of Jazz guitar is largely ignored (Wes Montgomery, where are you?), fusion is distained, smooth jazz is dismissed as aural wallpaper, non-American jazz players are barely mentioned (except for Django Reinhardt), and Marsalis is glorified to a point that even he must find embarassing. These flaws, while they probably accurately reflect Burns' personal taste, present a very skewed - possibly damaging - image to a jazz neophyte.
Ken Burns also devoted almost all his career to exploring black-white race relations. While this is a particularly American way to explore a largely American artform, it's also a very limiting one. Jazz of the period cannot be discussed without understanding mid-century Black American culture, but Jazz by definition transcends all our human smallness. Time and time again, Burns veers away from telling truly interesting and appropriate stories about the content of jam sessions to remind us of how segregated American society was. This gets very old very quickly and if this material had been edited there would have been more room to cover more Jazz greats - such as Montgomery, Count Basie, George Benson - in far more detail. Jazz itself should be the primary focus to an introductory primer such as this.
I purchased this book at a steep discount and keep it on my coffeetable. It's a great book if you are nostalgic, and it's a nice introduction to Jazz as long as you are aware of Ken Burns' biases. If you really want to learn more about Jazz, you're going to have to dig deeper, find a knowledgeable and supportive CD store, and explore this beautiful world in alternate ways.
 Jazz July 7, 2007
This history of Jazz is not only one of the best reads but with the addition of all the pictures this book is such a great insight to our culture not only for music lovers but all of society. A tuely remarkable book.
Great book...until the last chapter June 27, 2007
This is a very well-written, entertaining and informative book, and I learned a great deal while reading it and enjoying the many beautiful pictures. However, the last four decades of jazz are compressed into the last chapter, and some omissions (like George Shearing!) are inexplicable. Overall, this is a great introduction to jazz, but be aware of the shortcomings.
Interesting and entertaining book February 20, 2007
I brought this for a class and it is one of the few books I continue to read afterword. This is an excellent book.
Should be "Jazz Origins: Popular Jazz & It's Evolution." June 16, 2004
19 out of 21 found this review helpful
I really liked this book because it gave great detail to the Founding Giants of Jazz. I get disapointed with books that try to be all things to all people and end up just skiming over everything. I like that this book went in-depth with the most popular artists. To try to fully cover the "Complete History of Jazz" would take about 10,000 pages of similairly over-sized books broken into about 20 volumes. Critics I have read on this page do a lot of name dropping to show off some knowledge. Perhaps they should write a book or two on the subject; I would love to read such a book. "Fusion: The Complete Evolution" would be a great volume in the above mentioned theoretical 10,000 pager, but most people have no interest in fusion. If you start going into Anthony Braxton's complex sheet music you are just going to loose people. This book sticks to the popular art form which is an evolution of sorts on it's own. An evolution of popular music and the evolution of the "musician's music" are two different things. I think the authors gave people what they wanted with this book. The REALITY of publishing a book like this is that it has to have broad appeal. You just aren't going to get funding to do a book that spends 25 pages on an extremely talented yet popularly obscure artist. This book is great for the novice or for the more educated jazz historian who wants to read some great stories and see some great photo's even if many of them are "common jazz knowledge" and repeats. (The story of Armstrong running into Oliver while selling tomatoes is a classic. I hadn't heard that one.) It is not as comprehensive with the modern era but I feel that it is proportional to the popularity of Jazz. If you want a complete Jazz history, you will need a library of about 100 books. This book should be in that library.
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