Anyone interested in learning about a distinct music--jazz--will welcome this newest addition to the popular 101 reference series. Noted anthropologist, critic, and musical scholar John F. Szwed takes readers on a tour of the music's tangled history, and explores how it developed from an ethnic music to become North America's most popular music and then part of the avant garde in less than fifty years. Jazz 101 presents the key figures, history, theory, and controversies that shaped its development, along with a discussion of some of its most important recordings.

When Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton sat at the piano in the Library of Congress in May of 1938 to begin his monumental series of interviews with Alan Lomax, he spoke of his years on the West Coast with the nostalgia of a man recalling a golden age, a lost Eden. He had arrived in Los Angeles more than 20 years earlier, but he recounted his losses as vividly as though they had occurred just recently. The greatest loss was his separation from Anita Gonzales, by his own account "the only woman I ever loved", to whom he left almost all of his royalties in his will.;In "Dead Man Blues", Phil Pastras sets the record straight on the two periods (1917-1923 and 1940-1941) that Jelly Roll Morton spent on the West Coast. In addition to rechecking sources, correcting mistakes in scholarly accounts, and situating eyewitness narratives within the histories of New Orleans or Los Angeles, Pastras offers a fresh interpretation of the life and work of Morton, one of the most important and influential early practitioners of jazz. Pastras's discovery of a previously unknown collection of memorabilia - including a 58-page scrapbook compiled by Morton himself - sheds new light on Morton's personal and art

What is jazz? What is gained - and what is lost - when various communities close ranks around a particular definition of this quintessentially American music? "Jazz/Not Jazz" explores some of the musicians, concepts, places, and practices which, while deeply connected to established jazz institutions and aesthetics, have rarely appeared in traditional histories of the form. David Ake, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Goldmark have assembled a stellar group of writers to look beyond the canon of acknowledged jazz greats and address some of the big questions facing jazz today. More than just a history of jazz and its performers, this collections seeks out those people and pieces missing from the established narratives to explore what they can tell us about the way jazz has been defined and its history has been told.