Jazz: A History of America's Music

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

Geoffrey C. Ward is the author of 11 books, including A First-Class Temperament, which won the 1989 National Books Critics Cirlce Award and the 1990 Francis Parkman Prize. He has written for numerous documentary films, including The Civil War, Baseball, The West, and Not for Ourselves Alone, and is a frequent magazine contributor. He lives in New York City.

Ken Burns, founder of Florentine Films, is a director, producer, and writer who has been making documentaries for more than 15 years. His landmark film, The Civil War, is the highest-rated series in the history of American public television, and his work has received or been nominated for Grammy, Emmy, and Academy Awards, among others. He lives in Walpole, New Hampshire.