Ward, Geoffery and Burns, Ken. Jazz : A History of America’s Music. Knopf, 2000.
In this book, Ward and Burns work Jazz, is an effort at documenting the origins of the uniquely American music of the same name. The work covers the era know as the jazz erra, and stretches from 1900 to the late 1970’s. The work contains a significant collection of historical images of the era in addition to the stories of the people who Ward and Burns credit with making the music what it is.
This book is going to be very reverent to my paper, less because of what is in it specifically, but more because of what it has been in my life. I got this book when it first came out, as a kid. I would sit and read it in the quite of my room for hours on end, soaking up the images and stories of what jazz is. Or so I thought. I also watched the series that this book goes with in school as a part of my music education. I thought I knew about what jazz was. It has only been in retrospect, that I realized there is a lot missing form this story, and it is written form a very biased perspective. There is a whole bunch of stuff that is not even mentioned in this book, including a lot of things directly relating to AAPIA people’s involvement in jazz. More then anything else, this book is the reference point at which I stated this class at. This is the history I learned, and it is incomplete.