What is a popular kind of music that originated in the United States? The answer is Jazz. Mixing folk and blues influences, talented artists from Scott Joplin to Wynton Marsalis have kept jazz at the forefront of the American music scene. The musicians portrayed in this book played different instruments and had different styles, but all helped keep jazz fresh and new. Readers follow ten prominent jazz musicians (Scott Joplin, Daniel Louis Armstrong, Edward Kennedy Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, Benjamin David Goodman, John Birks Gillespie, Charles Christopher Parker, Jr., Miles Dewey Davis, III, John Coltrane, and Wynton Marsalis) through their many successes and varied hardships.

Essays consider the work of Sarah Vaughan, Teddy Wilson, Tony Bennett, Roy Eldridge, Lester Young, Joe Turner, Art Pepper, Sonny Stitt, Woody Herman, Wynton Marsalis, and Frank Sinatra

Keeping in mind the long history of music and its powerful effect on the human social and cultural psyche, this brand-new volume in the Innovators series profiles the most innovative and important individuals in music history. Each of these extended biographies offers concise and informative top matter that includes an introductory summary of the person's significance; birth and death dates and places; and specialty fields. Biographies represent a strong, global, cross-gender focus, and each biography offers a sidebar focusing on the group(s)/achievement(s) for which the subject is best known. Innovators in Music spans three large volumes, examining over 350 individuals and personalities who had an influential impact on the music industry, including: Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Ani DiFranco, Peter Gabriel, Arlo Guthrie, Janis Joplin, Patti LaBelle, John Lennon, Annie Lennox, Little Richard, Nicki Minaj, Willie Nelson, Itzhak Perlman, Lou Reed, Nina Simone, Patti Smith, Michael Stipe, Kanye West, Hank Williams, "Weird Al" Yankovic, and many more. -- salempress.com

This study examines the migration of African American jazz musicians to other parts of the world from 1919 to the present. It provides evidence that African American jazz musicians fared better in the diaspora than they did in America where jazz and its inventors were born. Written by an anthropologist who is also a jazz musician, it provides a treatment of the cultural, historical, artistic, innovative, and aesthetic aspects of the migration of African American jazz musicians to the diaspora.

Music and the Creative Spirit is a book of interviews with today's innovators in Jazz, Improvisation, and the Avant Garde, including Pat Metheny, Regina Carter, Fred Anderson, John Zorn, Joshua Redman, and others.

This history of jazz, spanning the twentieth century, is the first to place it within the broad context of American culture. Burton Peretti argues persuasively that this distinctive American music has been a key thread in the tapestry of the nation’s culture. The music itself, its players and its audience, and the critical debates it has prompted, tell us much about changes in American life since 1910. Mr. Peretti traces the emergence of jazz out of ragtime during a time of tumultuous growth of cites and industries. In the 1920s jazz flourished and symbolized the cultural struggle between modernists and traditionalists. As American sought reassurance and self-esteem during the Great Depression, jazz reached new levels of sophistication in the Swing Era. World War II encouraged rapid changes in popular tastes, and in the postwar decades jazz became both a voice of a globally dominant America and an avant-garde music reflecting social and political turmoil. Today, Mr. Peretti concludes, jazz symbolizes important cultural trends and enjoys a new prestige in a complex musical scene. Jazz in American Culture tells a peculiarly American story, evaluating the music as well as those who created it, and opening new perspectives on our cultural history.