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The History of Jazz

by Ted Gioia

A wide-ranging map of jazz’s musical and social history

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Paperback New English

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AlbakiReads Editorial

A wide-ranging map of jazz’s musical and social history

Spanning jazz from its early roots to contemporary artists and the digital era, this third edition organizes the genre through pivotal musicians, stylistic shifts, and the places where jazz communities developed. The account moves through sites including the Mississippi Delta, New Orleans, Harlem, and Chicago, placing musical change alongside its social setting. Figures such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Kamasi Washington, and Esperanza Spalding mark different moments in that history. Updated material addresses jazz’s exchanges with popular music, its renewed mainstream presence, and women whose contributions to the genre have often received less attention.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Jazz listeners seeking a broad historical overview
  • Music students interested in major jazz styles and artists
  • Readers interested in the social settings surrounding jazz’s development

Themes

Jazz historyMusical innovationSocial contextWomen in jazzJazz and popular culture

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Book overview

An updated new edition of Ted Gioia's universally acclaimed history of jazz, with a wealth of new insight on this music's past, present, and future.

Ted Gioia's The History of Jazz has been universally hailed as the most comprehensive and accessible history of the genre of all time. Acclaimed by jazz critics and fans alike, this magnificent work is now available in an up-to-date third edition that covers the latest developments in the jazz world and revisits virtually every aspect of the music.

Gioia's story of jazz brilliantly portrays the most legendary jazz players, the breakthrough styles, and the scenes in which they evolved. From Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, Miles Davis's legendary 1955 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, and Ornette Coleman's experiments with atonality to current innovators such as Kamasi Washington and Esperanza Spalding, Gioia takes readers on a sweeping journey through the history of jazz. As he traces the music through the swamp lands of the Mississippi Delta, the red light district of New Orleans, the rent parties of Harlem, the speakeasies of Chicago, and other key locales of jazz history, Gioia also makes the social contexts in which the music was born come alive.

This new edition finally brings the often overlooked women who shaped the genre into the spotlight and traces the recent developments that have led to an upswing of jazz in contemporary mainstream culture. As it chronicles jazz from its beginnings and most iconic figures to its latest dialogues with popular music, the developments of the digital age, and new commercial successes, Gioia's History of Jazz reasserts its status as the most authoritative survey of this fascinating music.
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