Jazz music is an ever-evolving fusion of style, a national art form embodying the metaphor of America as a complex cultural melting pot. From the start, early American musical elements — West African ...

San Francisco-Classic Jazz: The Musicians & Recordings that Shaped Jazz, 1895-1933 from Backbeat Books explores the birth and early development of a truly American art form. Written by veteran jazz ...

It may be a poor-man's explanation, but here it goes: bebop begat hard bop begat the freer post-bop. Free jazz emerged among them. What next? Jeff Williams' The Listener. The greater freedom of post ...

In the book, he talks about the 250 songs that are the foundation of the genre - the songs that any serious or aspiring jazz musician needs to know. These songs - from "Lush Life" to "Georgia on My ...

I had the good fortune, while still a teen-ager, in the nineteen-seventies, to catch some of the leading lights of modern jazz—including Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, ...