Concise Guide to Jazz

An introduction to jazz and how to listen to it

Written by active jazz musician and jazz historian Mark Gridley, the Concise Guide to Jazz was created in response to students and professors asking for a clear and accurate introductory jazz text. This brief text examines how jazz originated, how it is made, what to listen for, and the major style eras. By focusing on just over fifty historical figures, Concise Guide to Jazz, seventh edition allows students to understand a broad range of jazz styles without feeling overloaded. Concise Guide to Jazz focuses on the diversity of jazz styles and serves as a basis for further jazz exploration.

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Learning Goals

Upon completing this book, readers will be able to:

• Begin to appreciate how jazz is made
• Know how to extract the most depth of experience from listening to jazz
• Know who the most historically significant jazz musicians are
• Know why each significant musician is important
• Distinguish the main style eras

*Music for your course is available through Spotify.

Dr. Mark C. Gridley is the author of Jazz Styles: History and Analysis, America’s most widely used introduction to jazz. It emerged from the History and Styles of Jazz course that he had developed at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Jazz Styles has been required for jazz history classes in more than 400 colleges and universities. The book has been translated into 5 foreign languages, and its influence and reference value led to Gridley’s listing in Who’s Who in America. A Cleveland-based jazz flutist-saxophonist-bandleader, Gridley has also conducted field research in Africa and the Caribbean. For his studies of jazz popularity, Gridley earned the Distinguished Achievement Award of the Educational Press Association of America. His articles on jazz styles and teaching jazz appreciation appear in the Grove Dictionaries of Music, Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Black Perspective in Music, Black Music Research Journal, The Musical Quarterly, The Instrumentalist, Current Musicology, College Music Symposium, Popular Music and Society, and Jazz Educator’s Journal. His research on perception and preferences in music and art has been published in several scientific journals.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: What is Jazz?  

Chapter 2: How to Listen to Jazz

Chapter 3: The Origins of Jazz

Chapter 4: Early Jazz

Chapter 5: Swing

Chapter 6: Bebop

Chapter 7: Cool Jazz

Chapter 8: Hard Bop  

Chapter 9: Avant-Garde of the 1960s and 1970s

Chapter 10: Fusion

Chapter 11: 1985 to the Present

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