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 With its title inspired by the number of keys on the piano, this book reveals the colorful lives and careers of 88 pianists who have made outstanding contributions to jazz. From the pioneering legend Jelly Roll Morton to current stars and exciting young performers, these engaging profiles describe the importance and unique characteristics of each pianist. The author also discusses the recordings that reflect key aspects of each artist's playing style. Based on his experiences as a professional jazz pianist and music critic, Robert Doerschuk explores the vibrant world of jazz piano and its greats through historical research enhanced by musical analyses. He also provides firsthand accounts from such major jazz piano figures as Keith Jarrett and Cecil Taylor. Featured artists include Earl Hines, Count Basie, Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Herbie Hancock, Oscar Peterson, and dozens more.
BUY: 88: The Giants of Jazz Piano
 Anyone interested in learning about a distinctly American music--jazz--will welcome this newest addition to the popular 101 reference series. Jazz may not be America's only original art form, but it is the quintessential American music. Noted anthropologist, critic, and musical scholar John F. Szwed takes readers on a tour of the music's tangled history and explores how it developed from an ethnic music to become America's most popular music and then part of the avant garde in less than fifty years. Jazz 101 presents the key figures, history, theory, and controversies that shaped its development, along with a discussion of some of its most important recordings. It offers insightful commentary on how jazz helped shape twentieth-century American painting, film, poetry, dance, fiction, pop and classical music, and the consciousness of what it means to be American.
BUY: Jazz 101 : A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Jazz
 These are the intriguing stories behind more than 500 top jazz trumpeters of all time — many of whom still play today. This collection of profiles covers such legends as Louis Armstrong, Chet Baker, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and Wynton Marsalis, plus lesser-known but also noteworthy trumpeters from all jazz eras. Each profile traces the “plot” of the player’s life, emphasizing the personal or musical traits (if not eccentricities) that set each trumpeter apart from other musicians. Overall contributions to the world of jazz are also described, along with stories of colleagues, individual career details, and recommended recordings. Trumpet Kings also features a section on jazz figures who seem unlikely to have recorded on trumpet but did, such as Benny Goodman, Hoagy Carmichael, and Mose Allison.
BUY: Trumpet Kings: The Players Who Shaped the Sound of Jazz Trumpet
 A landmark in jazz studies, Thinking in Jazz reveals as never before how musicians, both individually and collectively, learn to improvise. Chronicling leading musicians from their first encounters with jazz to the development of a unique improvisatory voice, Paul Berliner documents the lifetime of preparation that lies behind the skilled improviser's every idea. The product of more than fifteen years of immersion in the jazz world, Thinking in Jazz combines participant observation with detailed musicological analysis, the author's experience as a jazz trumpeter, interpretations of published material by scholars and performers, and, above all, original data from interviews with more than fifty professional musicians. Thinking in Jazz overflows with musical examples from the 1920s to the present.
BUY: Thinking in Jazz : The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology Series)
 As Gary Giddins makes clear in his introduction to Visions of Jazz, he's not attempting to draw a canonical line in the sand: "Everyone has his or her vision of jazz, and this is mine." Modesty aside, though, it's hard to imagine a critic with a more encyclopedic grasp of detail, or a more lucid, funny, and appropriately musical style. Weighing in at almost 700 pages, the magnificent Visions of Jazz consists of 70 profiles, beginning with a dual portrait of blackface pioneers Bert Williams and Al Jolson and concluding with the klezmer-infatuated clarinetist Don Byron. These sketches mingle musical, biographical, and cultural insights--indeed, one of Giddins's great gifts is to break down the very distinction between such categories. Yet Giddins is hardly an unhinged generalizer, and he loves to zero in on a particular chorus and disclose its charms on a bar-by-bar basis. The pinnacle of this musical microscopy occurs in his Dizzy Gillespie essay, with an almost biblical exegesis of 64 measures from the 1989 version of "Salt Peanuts." But even in these nuts-and-bolts passages, Giddins is always accessible, combining precisely the right proportions of edification and old-fashioned entertainment. --James Marcus
BUY: Visions of Jazz : The First Century
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