All Music Guide to Jazz: The Experts' Guide to the Best Jazz Recordings (All Music Guide to Jazz, 3rd ed)

The AMG Jazz encyclopedia is the resource of choice for anything you might care to know about jazz musicians, jazz history, and jazz recordings. The print is small and there's not a lot of space wasted on photos and filler--in fact, the only non-text additions are 51 music maps, smartly illustrating which performers played in which categories of a range of topics, from accordion and big bands to vocal groups and significant fusion players. There are short essays on topics like ragtime, cool, acid jazz, jazz history, and jazz in film, plus indexes for jazz books, venues, and videos, producers, writers, and labels, and a much-appreciated comprehensive index. The bulk of this extraordinary reference, however, consists of musician profiles (more than 1,700) and reviews of their recordings (more than 18,000), arranged alphabetically from Greg Abate to John Zorn, providing biographical details of well-known figures such as Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, as well as his son T.S. Monk and more obscure artists such as Don Byas, Richard Tabnik, Oscar Pettiford, Hot Lips Page, and Chubby Jackson.

The profiles are well researched, short, and richly informative and entertaining. Take Bob Scobey, for example. In one brief paragraph, you learn he was a Dixieland trumpet player and band leader from Tucumcari, New Mexico, lived from December 9, 1916 to June 12, 1963, and was a popular trumpeter in his prime. He played in Watter's Yerba Buena Jazz Band in San Francisco (one of the most influential bands in the Dixieland revival), formed his own Frisco Jazz Band, opened Club Bourbon Street in 1959 in Chicago, and died four years later of cancer at 46. The profiles are reason enough to appreciate AMG Jazz, but the recording reviews are even more impressive. Following each biography is a comprehensive list of the artist's recordings, with a star rating (0 to 5), information about who plays what, how long it runs, what sort of music it is, notable high points, low points, or both, and any other songs or notes of historic or musical interest. Mesmerizingly addictive to jazz musicians, accessibly, enjoyably instructive to the novice, reliably erudite for the scholar, vastly entertaining for the browser, and irreplaceable as a CD-purchase guide, the All Music Guide to Jazz sets the standard for what a music-reference book should be. --Stephanie Gold