Jazz: A History of America's Music (Paperback)

by Geoffrey C. Ward (Author), Ken Burns (Author)

Editorial Reviews

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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly
A paperback reprint of the companion volume to the authoritative Burns and Ward documentary-the 19-hour, 10-episode series that aired on PBS in January, 2001-this lavishly illustrated history describes the evolution of jazz during the 20th century, focusing on the careers of a key players like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Benny Goodman. In his introduction to the massive volume, Burns writes that his decision to make Jazz was inspired by a comment made by Gerald Early, a writer he interviewed for the authors' last documentary, Baseball. "Two thousand years from now," Early said, "there will only be three things that Americans will be known for: The Constitution, baseball and jazz music." Burns admits he knew next to nothing about jazz before deciding to create "the most comprehensive treatment of jazz ever committed to film," and there lies the work's Achilles' heel. Burns has his conclusion-that jazz is a metaphor for the United States-firmly in hand before he begins to know his subject. This approach translates into a rather tepid, conservative view of jazz. Not every subject or musician can be touched upon in one book; however, it does seem strange that such a sweepingly titled volume does discuss the musical roots of jazz, e.g. Africa's talking drums, or mention the Lockbourne Airforce Base, where many noted black jazz musicians received training. The entire 40-year period from 1960 forward is relegated to a single chapter, a rather pronounced statement about how the authors feel about more recent achievements. More than 500 illustrations and photos.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (October 8, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679765395
• ISBN-13: 978-0679765394
• Product Dimensions: 10.5 x 9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #261,357 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

129 of 138 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Jazz Did Not End in 1955!, November 11, 2000

By	"ellul" (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jazz: A History of America's Music (Hardcover)

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.

34 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not perfect, but wonderful nonetheless, January 3, 2001

By	James J. McGaw (Portsmouth, RI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jazz: A History of America's Music (Hardcover)

I loved this book; it's well-balanced and has plenty of cultural perspective. There were lots of anecdotes and photos that I have never seen before (the pictures of blacks dancing at an outdoor big band show at Randalls Island in 1938 are almost worth the price of the book alone). The main criticism about this book (and the Ken Burns Jazz series in general) is that it gives short shrift to jazz since the 1960s. First off, as Ken Burns has said himself, he's an historian, so this project will obviously focus more on the origins and development of the music rather than present-day musicians. And as much as today's jazz musicians and fans like to tell you otherwise, there haven't been too many groundbreaking developments in the music since the free jazz movement of late Coltrane and early Ornette Coleman, or the funk/rock excursions by Miles Davis. Furthermore, and more importantly, jazz is simply no longer a big part of the present-day American landscape. Although jazz records rarely sold as well as more pop-oriented music (a jazz record that sold 20,000 copies was considered a big hit), the music was always written about in mainstream publications and talked about by just about anyone. Heck, guys like Miles, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Coltrane were occasionally featured on prime-time television. Today, the biggest (and perhaps only) jazz star is Wynton Marsalis, a bland neo-traditionalist who hasn't forged any new ground himself. For myself, I'd rather read about Satchmo, Bird, Billie Holiday and Monk.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Good Introduction To Jazz, January 23, 2001

By	Douglas Lytle (Prague, Czech Republic) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Jazz: A History of America's Music (Hardcover)

I would endorse this book and the accompanying series as a way for neophytes to enter an extremely challenging and complicated genre and as a reasonably good summation of the history of Jazz through 1960. But I would hope that Ken Burns' work isn't received as the final word on Jazz. Too often projects of these nature take on a Hand of God character and are regarded simply as the final take on a theme. Not so here, and anyone who knows the history of Jazz will point to numerous ommissions throughout the series. But if you're looking for a good entertaining way to learn or enjoy Jazz, this is probably a good bet. And if even one person ends up liking Jazz as a result of Burns' work, the world will be a better place. The series can't hurt and the debate is healthy. It just shouldn't be regarded as the only word on the subject.