The biographical encyclopedia of jazz / Leonard Feather & Ira Gitler, with the assistance of Swing journal, Tokyo.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Feather, Leonard, 1914-1994.

Contributor:

Gitler, Ira.

Feather, Leonard, 1914-1994.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Jazz--Bio-bibliography.

Jazz.

Jazz--Discography.

Genre:

Biographies.

Discographies.

Physical Description:

xx, 718 pages ; 27 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1999.

Summary:

From birth dates to gig dates and from recordings to television specials, Leonard Feather and Ira Gitler have left no stone unturned in their quest for accurate, detailed information on the careers of 3,300 jazz musicians from around the world. We learn that Duke Ellington worked his magic at The Cotton Club from 1927 to 1931, and that on Miles Davis's thirteenth birthday, his father gave him his first trumpet. Jazz is fast moving, and this edition clearly and concisely maps out an often dizzying web of professional associations. We find, for instance, that when Miles Davis was a St. Louis teenager he encountered Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie for the first time. This meeting proved fateful, and by 1945 a nineteen-year-old Davis had left Juilliard to play with Parker on 52nd Street. Knowledge of these professional alliances, along with the countless others chronicled in this book, are central to tracing the development of significant jazz movements, such as the "cool jazz" that became one of Miles Davis's hallmarks.

Arranged alphabetically according to last name, each entry of this book chronologically lists the highlights of every jazz musician's career. Highly accessible and vigorously researched, The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz is, quite simply, the most comprehensive jazz encyclopedia available.

Notes:

"This book is based in part on Leonard Feather's Encyclopedia of jazz, The new encyclopedia of jazz, and The encyclopedia of jazz in the sixties and on a subsequent work ... The encyclopedia of jazz in the seventies. The biographical encyclopedia of jazz is a thorough revision, recasting, and expansion of these books"--P. ix.

Related Work:

Feather, Leonard, 1914-1994. Encyclopedia of jazz.

Feather, Leonard, 1914-1994. Encyclopedia of jazz in the sixties.

Feather, Leonard, 1914-1994. Encyclopedia of jazz in the seventies.

ISBN:

0195074181

OCLC:

38746731