Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now. Cet article n’est pas disponible.Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now

Here is the largest, most comprehensive, and most stimulating collection of writings on jazz ever published.
The first of Reading Jazz's three parts is autobiographical, and in it such central jazz figures as Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Art Pepper, Count Basie, Anita O'Day, Lionel Hampton, Artie Shaw, and Cab Calloway reveal their lives and ideas in their highly charged and very persuasive first persons.
Part two is reportorial, encompassing formal profiles - Whitney Balliett's of Earl Hines and Peewee Russell, and Gene Lees's of Bill Evans and Dizzy Gillespie; Lillian Ross's hilarious account of the first Newport Jazz Festival; Ralph Ellison remembering Minton's Playhouse; and both Hampton Hawes and Miles Davis reminiscing about Charlie Parker.
Part three is critical, presenting a wide spectrum of opinion and approach, beginning with the famous 1919 essay by Ernst-Alexandre Ansermet (he conducted the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring) about jazz in general and Bechet in particular, and proceeding to such eminent writers as Nat Hentoff (on John Coltrane), Gunther Schuller (on Sarah Vaughan), Dan Morgenstern (on Louis Armstrong), Gary Giddins (on "Body and Soul"), Philip Larkin, Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch, LeRoi Jones, and many others.

"Comprehensive and intelligently organized. . . .  Jazz aficionados . . . should be grateful to have so much good writing on the subject in one place."-- The New York Times Book Review

"Alluring. . . . Capture[s] much of the breadth of the music, as well as the passionate debates it has stirred, more vividly than any other jazz anthology to date."-- Chicago Tribune

No musical idiom has inspired more fine writing than jazz, and nowhere has that writing been presented with greater comprehensiveness and taste than in this glorious collection. In Reading Jazz, editor Robert Gottlieb combs through eighty years of autobiography, reportage, and criticism by the music's greatest players, commentators, and fans to create what is at once a monumental tapestry of jazz history and testimony to the elegance, vigor, and variety of jazz writing.  
        Here are Jelly Roll Morton, recalling the whorehouse piano players of New Orleans in 1902; Whitney Balliett, profiling clarinetist Pee Wee Russell; poet Philip Larkin, with an eloquently dyspeptic jeremiad against bop. Here, too, are the voices of Billie Holiday and Charles Mingus, Albert Murray and Leonard Bernstein, Stanley Crouch and LeRoi Jones, reminiscing, analyzing, celebrating, and settling scores. For anyone who loves the music--or the music of great prose--Reading Jazz is indispensable.  

"The ideal gift for jazzniks and boppers everywhere. . . . It gathers the best and most varied jazz writing of more than a century."-- Sunday Times (London)