Summary

American history. Born of oppression and built upon improvisation, it transcends racial divisions and continuously evolves with the times. Originating in New Orleans, jazz migrated north during the Roaring Twenties, ignited by the Hot Jazz of Louis Armstrong. During the Great Depression, Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson brought the captivating sounds of Harlem nightclubs to dance halls across the country and helped usher in the Swing Era. As music tastes changed and rock and roll emerged during the 1950s, Miles Davis initiated a new era in jazz, and a legacy that lives on today. American Popular Music: Jazz follows the history and development of jazz through the years, monitoring a genre in musical history that remains vital and dynamic to American popular culture as we know it.

Entries include:

• Louis Armstrong
• Count Basie
• Big band jazz
• Birdland
• Cool jazz
• Miles Davis
• Duke Ellington
• Ella Fitzgerald
• Dizzy Gillespie
• Fletcher Henderson
• Improvisation
• The Mahavishnu Orchestra
• Modal jazz
• Kid Ory
• Ragtime
• Sun Ra
• Weather report
• and many others.

Specifications

Black-and-white photographs. Index. Bibliography. Glossary. Cross-references. Chronology. Discography.

About the Author(s)

Thom Holmes studied composition and improvisation at Temple University and has written about 20th-century music and jazz for 30 years. From 1979 to 1985, he was the publisher and editor of Recordings of Experimental Music, a forerunner of Electronic Musician magazine. He is the author of Electronic and Experimental Music.

Foreword author William Duckworth is the composer of more than 100 pieces of music and the author of six books and numerous articles, including "Making Music on the Web" from Leonardo Music Journal. He and co-director Nora Farrell began Cathedral, a multi-year work of music and art for the Web, in the mid-1990s, which went online in 1997. Incorporating acoustic and computer music, live Web casts by its own band, and newly created virtual instruments, Cathedral is one of the first interactive works of music and art on the Web. Duckworth is currently a professor of music at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.