Jazz: Essential Listening

Lowest price I found, excellent condition!

It helped me throughtout the semester. But the few pages had writings in them which made the book harder to read in the beginning. The rest were readable.

Needed this book for the semester. It arrived before the semester began and I will return at the end of semester. Easy rental process.

An amazing, insightful look into the history of Jazz and the struggle against racism. Please use free resources if you aren't required to purchase this for a class, it's SO expensive...

We're using this book as the basis of an adult-learning course, together with the Ken Burns' Jazz DVDs. It's a 2-term course, with 28 weeks (56 hours) total. We evaluated many books before selecting this one.We wanted to emphasize the music itself, and we had pretty much given up on that until we found this book. There are accompanying CDs and DVDs (you have to buy them separately) with interactive listening guides (you read on-screen what's happening with the music as you listen to it) that are great. The text of the listening guides is also in the book, so if you want to watch the selections for free on You Tube while you follow along in the book, you can do that without extra cost.There are many, many on-line resources on the W.W. Norton website which are free to use in conjunction with the book. There's an extensive library of short videos that show basic jazz concepts, quizzes, flash-cards, song clips, and many really interesting videos of the authors explaining various aspects of jazz.The book is co-authored by Gary Giddins, one of the premier U.S. jazz critics.This book and its associated materials have made it possible for our group of non-jazz-experts to learn a TON about the music together. It's been a wonderful resource. I highly recommend it.

This book has really good content and was perfect for my MUS122 class hosted at UNR.

The book is great at telling the story behind jazz in america, but it sort of leaves out the rest of the world and often leaves you wanting more technical information (I suppose that's why it's the 'essentials' edition). Alright for a book for a class, but if you want to actually learn about the era, go get a more in depth copy.

Teaching everything you need to know in order to understand jazz and the features of particular songs.

Great