Examines the current state of jazz and its development over the past twenty years.

A collection of poems recounts the efforts of Esquire magazine graphic designer Art Kane to photograph a group of famous jazz artists in front of a Harlem brownstone.

From record album liner notes to serious academic pieces, Martin Williams has been perceptively chronicling the development of jazz for over three decades. In this, his newest collection of jazz writings, Williams brings together many of his best pieces and covers new ground, with short columns on Teddy Wilson and George Winston and a longer article, "How Long Has This Been Going On?," examining the current state of jazz. In this last work, Williams notes that jazz is experiencing a period of "stylistic retrenchment or, if you will, a period of conservatism," and questions the fusion of jazz with rock. Williams cites the opinion of Wynton Marsalis and a number of other musicians, who "seem to see the whole fusion thing as a kind of commercial opportunism and artistic blind alley, maybe even a betrayal of the music." Arranged roughly according to the form of the writing (music reviews, profiles, etc.) the pieces included here examine the musicianship of jazz greats from Sidney Bechet to Ornette Coleman, including Lionel Hampton, Lee Konitz, Art Farmer, and others. There are also thought pieces on the development and direction of jazz and jazz scholarship. Together, these works provide an insightful overview of the development of jazz over the past twenty years.

'Jazz on the River' describes how musical entrepreneurs gave the music of New Orleans to mainstream America in the 1920s, by quite literally sending their musicians upstream, aboard riverboats that plied the Mississippi waterways every summer.

"Exuberant music, powerful narration, and image-filled poetry combine to create this extraordinary recording, winner of ALA's first Odyssey Award for excellence in audiobook production." The Horn Book

The most highly-acclaimed jazz theory book ever published! Over 500 pages of comprehensive, but easy to understand text covering every aspect of how jazz is constructed---chord construction, II-V-I progressions, scale theory, chord/scale relationships, the blues, reharmonization, and much more. A required text in universities world-wide, translated into five languages, endorsed by Jamey Aebersold, James Moody, Dave Liebman, etc.