For all that jazz has been touted as America’s classical music, a definitive textbook has been curiously slow to arrive. Jazz, a hefty tome with an emphatic title, stands to be that resource at last, not least because it resists the temptation to cast the music and its players as the stuff of history. Instead, what Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux provide is a hands-on guide to negotiating the canon, with no-nonsense explanations of relevant jargon, brief biographies of major innovators and listening guides that walk you through the contours of 75 selected recordings. Starting with the genre’s prehistory in traditional African music, Jazz charts a familiar progression from New Orleans polyphony through swing, bebop, free jazz and fusion, ending with an assessment of current postmodernist trends and styles.

For readers already versed in jazz, the combined authority here will be inherently compelling. Giddins is without question the most persuasive literary stylist currently working in jazz criticism – no writer has ever written about Louis Armstrong with such vividness, or about Cecil Taylor with such sympathy and analytical insight. DeVeaux provides academic clout and formal rigor, bringing to bear a strong foundation in musicological methodology. What that means in practical terms is that Jazz does not especially reward casual savouring; Giddins (in Visions of Jazz) and DeVeaux (with The Birth of Bebop) showcase their critical voices better elsewhere. The text is mostly dry and functional, lacking Giddins’s characteristic flights of imaginative description.

What makes Jazz a serious triumph, though, is the way its listening guides are meant to work in conjunction with a four-CD companion set featuring the tracks dissected in the book. Alone, the discs provide an overdue replacement for Martin Williams’s Smithsonian anthology, once essential but now badly dated. More important, following the recordings with text in hand, you learn not just what to listen for, but how to listen, period.

Steve Smith

Jazz is published by Norton