Do you want to know when Duke Ellington was king of The Cotton Club? Have you ever wondered how old Miles Davis was when he got his first trumpet?
From birth dates to gig dates and from recordings to television specials, Leonard Feather and Ira Gitler have left no stone unturned in their quest for accurate, detailed information on the careers of 3.300 jazz musicians from around the world. We learn that Duke Ellington worked his magic at The Cotton Club from 1927 to 1931, and that on Miles Davis's thirteenth birthday, his father gave him his first trumpet. Jazz is fast moving, and this edition clearly and concisely maps out an often dizzying web of professional associations. We find, for instance, that when Miles Davis was a St. Louis teenager he encountered Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie for the first time. This meeting proved fateful, and by 1945 a nineteen-year-old Davis had left Juilliard to play with Parker on 52nd Street. Knowledge of these professional alliances, along with the countless others chronicled in this book, are central to tracing the development of significant jazz movements, such as the "cool jazz" that became one of Miles Davis's hallmarks.
Arranged alphabetically according to last name, each entry of this book chronologically lists the highlights of every jazz musician's career. Highly accessible and vigorously researched, The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz is, quite simply, the most comprehensive jazz encyclopedia available.

Over a ten-year period, Ira Gitler interviewed more than fifty of the major figures in jazz history to preserve for posterity their recollections of how jazz moved from the big band era in the late 1930s and 1940s into the modern jazz period. The musicians interviewed recreate their own experiences and also evoke the legendary figures of bop who were especially influential in its development but were rarely or never recorded, people like Clyde Hart and Freddie Webster.

Back in the early 1940s, late at night in the clubs of Harlem, a handful of jazz musicians began to experiment with a style that no one had ever heard before. The music was fast, complicated, impossible to play for many of the older musicians--but it soon became the lingua franca of jazz music. They called it bebop, and as the years went by, it became even more popular. Today it reigns as perhaps the best-loved style of jazz ever created. Ira Gitler conveys the excitement of this musical birth as only someone who was there can. In "The Masters of Bebop," Gitler traces the advent of what was a revolution in sound. He profiles the leading players--Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillepie, Max Roach--but also studies the style and music of the first disciples, such as Dexter Gordon and J. J. Johnson, to reveal bebop's pervasive influence throughout American culture. Revised with an updated discography--and with a new chapter covering bebop right up through the end of the twentieth century--"The Masters of Bebop" is the essential listener's handbook.