What Jazz Is: An Insider's Guide to Understanding and Listening to Jazz

Rating:
Summary: An incomplete project
Review: This book is clearly written and has the potential to be a great introduction to jazz for jazz beginners like me. The problem is that half of the value of the book lies in King's analysis of ten jazz numbers by ten artists from ten differet Blue Note CDs, and as a jazz beginner I don't have those ten CDs. Out of a collection of 60+ jazz CDs, I have only one of them. I am not going to go out and buy the other nine just to get the one number on each that is discussed by King. It would cost too much. Like most beginners, most of my jazz CDs are the "classics" by various artists. But King's list consists almost entirely of numbers from second-tier CDs, those that are not the most popular among ordinary jazz listeners but which are popular among (some) professional jazz musicians. The value of the book would be magnified greatly if it had a CD with it, containing all of the ten pieces that he analyzed. My guess is that King tried to get Blue Note to put out such a CD, but Blue Note wouldn't cooperate. Given that, King should have revised the last part of the book in favor of pieces from CDs that most jazz beginners would have in their collections. After all, the book was supposedly written for jazz beginners, not for jazz experts. I'm not saying that the book is useless as it is. In fact, I enjoyed it. But it is an incomplete project. It could have been so much better.

Rating:
Summary: Tremendous introduction to jazz
Review: What an absolute pleasure to sit down on a rainy afternoon with Jonny King's book open to the chapter on "Ballads," reading his affectionate deconstruction of Hank Mobley's "Remember", playing Mobley's CD at the same time and listening along ... then listening again, and again, hearing new things every time. King's enthusiastic and accessible analyses open doors for those of us who have always liked jazz, but never fully appreciated its structure and nuances because we don't play an instrument and haven't known precisely what to listen for. I fervently hope the author is working on Volume Two.

Rating:
Summary: Tremendous introduction to jazz
Review: What an absolute pleasure to sit down on a rainy afternoon with Jonny King's book open to the chapter on "Ballads," reading his affectionate deconstruction of Hank Mobley's "Remember", playing Mobley's CD at the same time and listening along ... then listening again, and again, hearing new things every time. King's enthusiastic and accessible analyses open doors for those of us who have always liked jazz, but never fully appreciated its structure and nuances because we don't play an instrument and haven't known precisely what to listen for. I fervently hope the author is working on Volume Two.