Visions of Jazz
The First Century
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Poised to become a classic of jazz literature, Visions of Jazz: The First Century offers seventy-nine chapters illuminating the lives of virtually all the major figures in jazz history. From Louis Armstrong's renegade-style trumpet playing to Sarah Vaughan's operatic crooning, and from the swinging elegance of Duke Ellington to the pioneering experiments of Ornette Coleman, jazz critic Gary Giddins continually astonishes the reader with his unparalleled insight. Writing with the grace andwit that have endeared his prose to Village Voice readers for decades, Giddins also widens the scope of jazz to include such crucial American musicians as Irving Berlin, Rosemary Clooney, and Frank Sinatra, all primarily pop performers who are often dismissed by fans and critics as mere derivatives of the true jazz idiom. And he devotes an entire quarter of this landmark volume to young, still-active jazz artists, boldly expanding the horizons of jazz - and charting and exploring the music's influences as no other book has done.
About this Author
Gary Giddins is the jazz critic for the Village Voice. He lives in New York City.
Reviews
"The publication of Visions of Jazz is a major event because Gary Giddins is our best jazz critic....[It] is the finest unconventional history of jazz ever written--a brilliant, indispensable book."--Alfred Appel, Jr., The New York Times Book Review
"No American writer has ever written better about music, as richly demonstrated in Giddins' Visions of Jazz. This splendid critical history is classic Giddins: breathtaking in its scope (minstrelsy as well as bebop, Spike Jones as well as Elvin Jones), audacious in its erudition (only Giddins could make a salient link between Dizzy Gillespie and Saul Bellow), and profoundly mindful of the connection between biography and art."--Daniel Okrent, Fortune
"Giddins's eclectic range and meticulous attention to detail are nothing less than astonishing. Visions of Jazz is a landmark destined to occupy a permanent niche on the shelf of essential jazz literature."--Grover Sales, The Los Angeles Times Book Review
"The definitive compendium by the most interesting jazz critic now at work. [Giddins] knows his subject, his prose is interesting and graceful, his judgments are measured and fair, and the only camp of which he is a member is his own...He understands that jazz is American to the core and that the very essence of America is heterogeneity. It may not be intended as such, but Visions of Jazz is a celebration and reaffirmation of precisely that."--Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
"Giddins's singular achievement is to place jazz in an allusive social and cultural context....In Visions nothing is left behind. Giddins has written a captivating chronicle of jazz's perpetual renewal."--Robert Taylor, The Boston Globe
"A remarkably nonideological critic, Giddins has long demonstrated a passion for jazz in all its guises...His writing, like the music he loves, is joyously polyphonic, with history, legend, musicology, biography, and performance all rising out of the mix."--The New Yorker
"Giddins is never slack. He can stop a reader dead with a riveting summary line ('Miles contained multitudes'); turn cliches into truisms ('Basie knew that if he had your foot, your heart and mind would follow'); or draw the skimming reader's attention back to the show with the verbal equivalent of turning the rhythm around (of Ornette Coleman, for example: 'His quarter-tone pitch remains as fixed as the North Star, directing the listener to a distinctive realm where tears and laughter amalgamate')....His detailed discussion leads you to back to the records and makes you want to hear them through his ears."--John Szwed, Jazziz
"Gary Giddins has long been regarded as one of the jazz world's most astute observers. His Visions of Jazz is a massive attempt to encompass the music from its earliest beginnings....The essays are superbly written, manifest examples of the manner in which the best writing about jazz combines historical perspective, social insights, and musical understanding."--Don Heckman, The Los Angeles Times
"One of our most skillful jazz critics offers a monumental work of ambition...a canny celebration of jazz as a hotbed of intransigent individuality, of creation-on-the-fly... [While] he brings an unerring critical intelligence to his analyses of the music and a formidable grasp of music theory and practice, his writing has grown so compressed and aphoristic through the years that it now has the burnished weightiness of, say, film critic Manny Farber's work. Giddins has become a master of the lightning insight, the unexpected connection (his use of literary anthologies is particularly apt).... This is an important book, one that any serious student of jazz will want to own. Deserves a place on the jazz bookshelf alongside the best of Martin Williams and Francis Davis, and you can't get much better than that."--Kirkus Reviews
"Titans roamed the land and plied the rivers...Giddins limns them all incisively and often poetically. [His] passion and commitment burn through Visions of Jazz like a hot, blue flame."--Don Asher, The San Francisco Chronicle
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