Playboy Guide to Jazz - Softcover

Tesser, Neil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452276489 ISBN 13: 9780452276482

Publisher: Penguin, 1998

Synopsis

The ideal introduction to the history of jazz and its rich and varied heritageIn The Playboy Guide to Jazz noted jazz critic Neil Tesser has selected from the thousands of available jazz recordings 250 of the best CDs, grouping them into chapters devoted to significant movements and periods of jazz history. The result is a concise and insightful guide to the milestones and markers in the history of recorded jazz.Since the late 1980s, jazz has achieved a hold on Americans unmatched since the 50s, and Playboy has a long history of commitment to jazz, sponsoring the annual Playboy Jazz Festival for the past seventeen years.Going beyond the monotonous cataloguing of other reference guides and to communicating the complexity of jazz music, The Playboy Guide to Jazz explores the improvisations, mutations of style, spontaneous compositions, and multi-layered voices. This up-to-date and inspiring reference will expand the horizons of new and old jazz listeners alike.-- The Playboy logo has become synonymous with jazz, with an ongoing series, "The History of Jazz", in the magazine, and a four-CD anthology of jazz recordings issued to commemorate the magazine's fortieth anniversary.-- One out of every 12 men in the United States who bought jazz CDs last year is a Playboy reader.-- Playboy will promote "The Playboy Guide to Jazz" in the magazine.

About this title

Review

Jazz is a music of the oppressed, but it is also a commodity--a taste cultivated by the hip both for its merits and for the prestige brownie points that go with it. The Playboy Guide to Jazz, Tesser's guide to the recorded legacy on CD and to a selection of what is newest and best, is a mixture of the intelligent and the merely modish. His final list of the best recordings ever has some attractive eccentricities--a lot of the eminently predictable and a solid base in what is actually the best. At the same time, it is a list composed, one feels, partly with a view to having a respectable pile of discs as social accessories and intellectual furniture; his connection with Playboy is not merely notional and his taste for jazz is in part a bachelor lifestyle choice. His brief historical accounts of the different phases of the music are solid enough and contentious enough to be respectably personal--and at his best he is good on what makes particular albums wonderful. His sense of first the 78 and then the long-playing record as crucial to the development of the music is a useful corrective to people who ignore technology and cash in their accounts of art. --Roz Kaveney

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0452276489
• ISBN 13: 9780452276482
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304