Great jazz music didn’t appear in a vacuum and in this article we’ve picked 10 books which allow the reader to get deeper into jazz history. The goal? To discover the people and the situations which led to the evolution of the music we love.
Whether you’re an artist, fan or just starting to learn an instrument, a lot of focus is (of course) on listening to or playing jazz.
But getting to know the history of the music gives it context and brings the people who made it to life.
In fact, almost any question you have about jazz instruments, styles or trends can be found in stories from the past.
It can also be starkly revealing for a lot of modern music which purports to be ‘cutting edge’ that many of the hippest trends can be found in recordings from way back, if you know where to look! Before we dive into the details, let’s look at our top 3 jazz history books:
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Jazz Music History
Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (Gunther Schuller)
The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930–1945 (Gunther Schuller)
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Best known as the French horn player on Miles Davis’ The Birth of The Cool, Gunther Schuller had a varied career as a performer, conductor, composer and academic.
Schuller’s book on early jazz is thoroughly researched and details the genre’s beginnings and transformations in the ’20s.
His second volume covers jazz up until the mid-forties, and the reader is given a sense of the painstakingly methodical approach in the preface: we are told he listened to over 30,000 recordings in compiling the book.
Musically notated examples and discographies make these publications essential reading for anyone wishing to study jazz in its youth in fine detail.
Bebop: The Music and Its Players (Thomas Owens)
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Thomas Owens describes the defining characteristics of bebop vocabulary as they are distinctive from the styles which came before and after, as well as the individual approaches of bebop’s significant players.
The book is organised by instrument group, after a prehistory of the style and discussion of bebop’s most eminent exponent, Charlie Parker.
This configuration leads to many discussions about musical roles and techniques often missing in books of its kind, such as the evolving responsibilities of drummers and bass players.
Complementing this close examination of the period is a slew of notated examples (often with functional analysis) and there are frequent lists of recorded examples for further study.
Record Label Histories
Blue Note Records: The Biography (Richard Cook)
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Exploring jazz history through a lens other than style, instrument or chronology can shed new light on what we think we know about the music and its contributors.
This account of the record company which issued some of jazz’s most important albums is principally about the music released.
However, it also examines the overall design and artwork of the record sleeves and how these aspects contributed to a recognisable brand still much-loved today.
Richard Cook, clearly a fan of the label, gives Blue Note a cultural context without falling into the trap of stringing together a succession of record reviews.
Jazz enthusiasts, no doubt possessing many of the discussed albums in their collection, will consume this book with gusto.
ECM – A Cultural Archaeology (ed. by Okwui Enwezor and Markus Müller)
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