Giddins, a longtime Village Voice contributor and one of our most
skillful jazz critics (Faces in the Crowd, 1992, etc.), offers a
monumental work of ambition, an attempt to encapsulate a hundred
years of jazz history in 79 essays on the music's great creators.
Actually, more properly, this is about the progenitors of jazz,
benchmark figures and some idiosyncratic characters who helped make
it a unique art form. Readers will look in vain for some key
musicians - no Sidney Bechet, Ben Webster, Woody Herman, Albert
Ayler here. What they will find, however, should more than amply
reward: a canny celebration of jazz as a hotbed of intransigent
individuality, of creation-on-the-fly. On the threshold of its
second century, jazz faces a crisis of historical interpretation.
As Giddins writes, "Jazz has been taken up by the academy at a time
when only the academy can keep track of it." Giddins has made no
attempt to smooth out the complicated wrinkles of the schools,
trends, and cycles of which jazz history seems to be made. But,
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 Father's work. Giddins has become a master of the
lightning insight, the unexpected connection (his use of literary
analogies is particularly apt). Visions raises some quibbles., and
it is not a book to be read straight through, not surprising, given
its length and intensity. Occasionally Giddins assumes too much
knowledge of his readers. And a discography would help a lot. But
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)
Visions of Jazz: The First Century contains 79 chapters that illuminate the lives of virtually all major figures in jazz history. Poised to become a classic, this volume is an evocative journey through the first one hundred years of jazz music.
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