Music: Jazz

The Canadian Jazz Archive Online is brought to you by JAZZ FM.91, Canada’s premier jazz radio station, together with the generous support of the Department of Canadian Heritage through Canadian Culture Online.
On this site you will find the most comprehensive collection of Canadian jazz resources currently available online, including:
- selections of archived performances from 30 years of the JAZZ.FM91 Sound of Jazz (formerly Sound of Toronto) Concert Series
- biographies and a chronology of artists who performed in the Sound of Jazz Concerts over the decades
- in-depth documentaries on some iconic Canadian jazz artists
- fun classroom-ready teaching tools
…and a wealth of engaging aural, visual and textual material that will appeal to artists, educators, students, and jazz enthusiasts!

News and information about artists, festivals, albums, and more.

In this passionately opinionated encyclopedia of the old-school virtuosos of the American songbook, music writer Friedwald (Sinatra!) celebrates 200-odd performers of jazz and pop standards, from the mid-20th-century titans-Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra-to latter-day acolytes like Diana Krall and Harry Connick Jr., with a raft of unjustly obscure singers in between. (Forget the Andrews Sisters-get a load of the Boswell Sisters!) Friedwald is all about the music; he primly shies away from his subjects' scandal-prone personal lives, but accords each a substantial career retrospective, selected discography and wonderfully pithy interpretive essay. His tastes are wide-ranging and idiosyncratic: he plumbs the artistry of Jimmy Durante's and Shirley Temple's novelty voices, decries the bombastic narcissism of "sacred monster" Barbra Streisand-"I remain completely unconvinced that she's a person who needs people"-and considers perky Doris Day's pop gems "the most erotic vocalizing you'll ever hear." However unconventional, his judgments are usually spot-on, as in his compelling reassessment of Elvis as the last great Crosbyesque crooner. Friedwald's exuberant medley is that rarest of things: music criticism that actually makes you sit up and listen.

Previous editions of this extraordinary reference are cited in Americn Reference Books Annual. It's worth bringing out the reading classes to make use of this guide to 20,000-plus recordings by 1,700 artists. Essays on jazz styles and on how to get started with jazz accompany the catalog of reviewed and rated recordings. Concise and colorful profiles describe each performer's life and career, style, principal instrument(s), and top recordings. Interspersed throughout are helpful "music maps" that track the use and users of particular instruments and the development of various threads in the history of jazz.

The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, second edition is the largest, most comprehensive and accurate reference work on jazz ever published, putting the world of jazz at your fingertips. With articles on every aspect of the field, from jazz groups, composers and arrangers to instruments, terms, record labels and venues, the new edition is the ideal companion for scholars and enthusiasts in this rapidly growing field. The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, second edition is unique:
· No other title covers jazz to this extent across all forms and styles
· The only way to be completely up-to-date with the full scope of writing in this field
· Provides new perspectives to established areas of study--musicology, film and media, American studies, modern social history, women's studies and cultural studies, to name a few
· Offers a one-stop resource to all the key names in the jazz world

DeVeaux (music, Univ. of Virginia) provides a fresh look at the social forces that helped foster bebop jazz. Concentrating on the years from the late 1930s through 1945, he first examines the growth of a national music market, which helped generate mass hysteria over big bands and their leaders. The second section describes such societal factors as the postwar economic slump, ongoing racism, the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement, and the rise of small venues for performance as reasons for the shift from an interest in big bands toward more specialized music, including small combo jazz. The last section discusses the popularity among jazz aficionados of virtuosos such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who deserted big bands for small combo bop improvisation. Despite some unnecessary music theory, the author has successfully presented a compelling rationale for bop as both an evolution and a revolutionary break from the musical past. Recommended for anyone interested in jazz or America during the war.

The vibrant world of jazz may be viewed from many perspectives, from social and cultural history to music analysis, from economics to ethnography. It is challenging and exciting territory. This volume of nineteen specially commissioned essays provides informed and accessible guidance to the challenge, offering the reader a range of expert views on the character, history and uses of jazz. The book starts by considering what kind of identity jazz has acquired and how, and goes on to discuss the crucial practices that define jazz and to examine some specific moments of historical change and some important issues for jazz study. Finally, it looks at a set of perspectives that illustrate different 'takes' on jazz - ways in which jazz has been valued and represented.

Thorough in its criticism as well as its chronology, Gioia's (The Imperfect Art) may be the most comprehensive (and readable) undertaking of jazz scholarship in recent memory. Contrary to pianist Jelly Roll Morton's famous claim that he invented the genre, Gioia traces jazz's origins to the slave dances of early 19th-century New Orleans. In the tradition of Leonard Feather and Nat Hentoff, Gioia considers jazz America's lone indigenous art form, but not without acknowledging the foremost importance of its "Africanization." Gioia documents the genre's evolution from the 19th century to today's hip downtown New York scene. Chapters detail each of the genre's major stylistic shifts, profiling unsung innovators as well as celebrities of each era from Louis Armstrong to Charles Mingus to the Marsalis brothers, Gioia's brief biographies serve to introduce the reader to the musicians' important work. The author's academic approach to Charlie Parker's drug-fueled artistic decline or Bud Powell's mental illness may not satiate fans of celebrity gossip, and the book's appendix of recommended recordings is lacking in sufficiently detailed catalogue information. After (and during) The History of Jazz, readers will surely want to search out more than a performance or two.

Explore the development of jazz music with JAZZ: THE FIRST 100 YEARS with accompanying audio CD! From its nineteenth-century roots in blues and ragtime, through swing and bebop, to fusion and contemporary jazz styles, this music text gives you a true feel for the vibrant, ever-changing sound of jazz. Learning is made easy with The Audio Jazz Primer CD that allows you to hear the key terms, basic music concepts, and jazz instruments discussed in the book. Key terms, topics for discussion, and the jazz basics appendix help you master difficult concepts.

Howard Reich's writings on jazz have captured the music's spirit of fearless spontaneity and soulful lyricism. Let Freedom Swing showcases the best of these writings from the last quarter century. Each section of Let Freedom Swing is a suite, focusing on people, a place, or a scene. Reich gives new life to the standards with his profiles and elegies for such giants as Gershwin, Ellington, and Sinatra, while also helping to introduce readers to the younger voices that continue to revitalize the jazz scene.

This will certainly be the definitive source on improvisational jazz. A leader in the field, Berliner (ethnomusicology, Northwestern) covers all aspects of improvisation as art form, science, and way of life. Cutting no corners, he includes a vast range of article topics (from inspiration and arrangements to evaluation and audience interaction), music texts (from the 1920s to the present), artist interviews, and disc-, video-, and bibliographies. Of the caliber of Grove's Dictionary of Music, this book is no less important to any serious music collection. Practicing musicians will be satisfied by the text and musical examples, while lay readers will come to understand the significance of jazz in American history and culture. This extraordinary accomplishment is well worth the investment for all academic and large public libraries.