Today, jazz is considered high art, America’s national music, and the catalog of its recordings—its discography—is often taken for granted. But behind jazz discography is a fraught and highly colorful history of research, fanaticism, and the intense desire to know who played what, where, and when. This history gets its first full-length treatment in Bruce D. Epperson’s More Important Than the Music. Following the dedicated few who sought to keep jazz’s legacy organized, Epperson tells a fascinating story of archival pursuit in the face of negligence and deception, a tale that saw curses and threats regularly employed, with fisticuffs and lawsuits only slightly rarer. Epperson examines the documentation of recorded jazz from its casual origins as a novelty in the 1920s and ’30s, through the overwhelming deluge of 12-inch vinyl records in the middle of the twentieth century, to the use of computers by today’s discographers. Though he focuses much of his attention on comprehensive discographies, he also examines the development of a variety of related listings, such as buyer’s guides and library catalogs, and he closes with a look toward discography’s future. From the little black book to the full-featured online database, More Important Than the Music offers a history not just of jazz discography but of the profoundly human desire to preserve history itself.

This annotated bibliography contains over 700 entries covering adult non-fiction books on jazz published from 1990 through 1999. Entries are organized by category, including biographies, history, individual instruments, essays and criticism, musicology, regional studies, discographies, and reference works. Three indexes—by title, author, and subject—are included.

A collection of essays, biographical profiles, and critical analyses by one of the twentieth century's leading jazz writers includes commentary on the work of jazz entertainers, including Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, and Louis Armstrong, as well as assessment of the role of jazz in contemporary culture and its influence on modern music.

The Reader's Guide to Music is designed to provide a useful single-volume guide to the ever-increasing number of English language book-length studies in music. Each entry consists of a bibliography of some 3-20 titles and an essay in which these titles are evaluated, by an expert in the field, in light of the history of writing and scholarship on the given topic. The more than 500 entries include not just writings on major composers in music history but also the genres in which they worked (from early chant to rock and roll) and topics important to the various disciplines of music scholarship (from aesthetics to gay/lesbian musicology).

Timme Rosenkrantz (1911–1969) was a Danish journalist, author, concert and record producer, radio show host, and entrepreneur with a consuming passion for jazz and little head for business. Known in Denmark and New York as the “Jazz Baron” because of his noble lineage, he was the first European journalist to cover the jazz scene in Harlem. Harlem Jazz Adventures: A European Baron’s Memoir, 1934–1969 recounts Rosenkrantz’s happy years in New York City, where he would produce jazz concerts, record top musicians and bands in his midtown apartment, organize a “dream band” for Timme Rosenkrantz and His Barrelhouse Barons, a 1938 RCA Victor recording, (DL) live in Harlem and run a record shop with his life companion, journalist and singer Inez Cavanaugh. A good friend of jazz impresario John Hammond, Rosenkrantz would become the James Boswell of the Harlem jazz scene. Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday—there wasn’t a New York jazz musician unknown to “Honeysuckle Rosenkrantz,” as christened by Fats Waller. Drawing on the published Danish-language original Dus med Jazzen, and an unpublished English free translation (DL) by Rosenkrantz and Cavanaugh, translator-adapter Fradley Hamilton Garner gives polish and context to Rosenkrantz’s stories of meetings with Cecile and Louis Armstrong, Benny Carter, Willie “The Lion” Smith, Eddie Condon, Erroll Garner—whom Rosenkrantz discovered and was first to record—and many others. This book is a must-have for jazz lovers. Social historians interested in the intersection of race and the music business will find in Rosenkrantz’s memoir an invaluable primary source on Harlem’s social scene and its musical legacy.

Jazz: Research and Pedagogy is the third edition of an annotated bibliography to books, recordings, videos, and websites in the field of jazz. Since the publication of the 2nd edition in 1995, the quantity and quality of books on jazz research, performance, and teaching materials have increased. Although the 1995 book was the most comprehensive annotated jazz bibliography published to that date, several books on research, performance, and teaching materials were omitted. In addition, given the proliferation of new books in all jazz areas since 1995, the need for a new, comprehensive, and annotated reference book on jazz is apparent. Multiply indexed, this book will serve as an excellent tool for librarians, researchers, and scholars in sorting through the massive amount of new material that has appeared in the field over the last decade.

This is a comprehensive guide to popular music literature, first published in 1986. Its main focus is on American and British works, but it includes significant works from other countries, making it truly international in scope.

Some may only know the jazz legend Stan Getz, tenor saxophonist, for his bossa nova hits "Desafinado" and "The Girl from Ipanema." However, Getz, born in 1927, began to play professionally at age 15, and his rich musical career lasted until shortly before his death on June 6, 1991. He played in a wide variety of musical settings such as big band, orchestral, quartet, and duo. The incredible beauty of his sound sparked the late jazz great John Coltrane to say, "We would all play like Stan Getz, if we could." When Getz died, jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie said, "He was sheer genius. And there's one thing about this man, he was the most melodic player on the jazz scene." This bibliography, the first of its kind, contains a total of 2,576 bibliographic citations with 2,292 of them annotated. It includes references to periodical literature, articles from news wire services, books, dissertations, films, videos, television programs, radio broadcasts, and Web sites. The citations are primarily from English-language sources. Materials in English and French as well as a handful of items from other languages are annotated. This work includes a preface that contains the scope of the work, a user's guide, and a list of more than 340 periodicals cited. The main body of the work is divided into the following sections: album reviews, performance reviews, discographies and discographical information, transcriptions, biographical and critical works, filmography, and appendix. Album reviews are provided for 240 albums, along with the discographical details for each of these albums. The appendix contains unannotated citations to materials in Danish, Dutch, German, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish.