Jazz is

This book is a selective tribute and guide to the jazz life, the players, and the music. It is not a chronological or comprehensive history, but rather a personal exploration through variegated seminal figures of a nature of the music (and how it keeps changing). And it is about the nature of those who make the music - temperaments as disparate as those of Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. It tells, too, of the political economy of jazz, its internationalization, the continuing surprises of its futher frontiers.