109 black & white plates

Originally published in 1959, Jazz has become one of the most collectible photography books from the mid-twentieth century. Like William Claxton’s Jazzlife and Dennis Stock’s Jazz Street, Van Der Elsken’s entry in the niche of jazz photography was published just prior to the moment when rock’n’roll cemented its place as the popular music of choice for young people. This book is perhaps the most successful of numerous attempts to capture photographically the essence of jazz because it is more than just a succession of musicians’ portraits, or even a documentary record of performance, but a book that visually echoes the music itself. Other photographers, perhaps closer to the jazz community, have made books on the subject, but Van Der Elsken’s is the work of an authentic jazz fan and a maker of authentic photobooks.

John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Ornette Coleman – some of the names that brought jazz out of the age of bebop and into the present.

As the medium matured in the Forties, Fifties and Sixties, an intense flowering of new styles spawned almost as many forms as musicians – free jazz, West Coast cool, hard bop, modal jazz, fusion.

All these strains come together here to demonstrate that, with all the variety, one constant remains: jazz, the living art form, is alive and thriving.

Illustrated throughout in colour and black and white

Vinyl mania. Jazz LP covers from the 1940s to 1990s

This volume features a broad selection of jazz record covers, from the 1940s through the decline of LP production in the early 1990s. Each cover is accompanied by with a fact sheet listing performer and album name, art director, photographer, illustrator, year, label, and more. Special features for jazz lovers include a top-10 favourite records list by leading jazz DJs King Britt, Michael McFadden, Gilles Peterson, Andre Torres, and Rainer Trüby, as well as interviews with legendary jazz personalities Rudy Van Gelder (sound engineer that recorded for many labels such as Blue Note, Impulse!, and Prestige), Creed Taylor (founder of many labels and one of the best jazz producers ever, credited also for bringing bossa nova to the US and fusing it with jazz), Michael Cuscuna (Blue Note jazz producer and catalogue researcher, responsible for its most successful re-editions), Bob Ciano (designer at the CTI Label, founded in the ’70s by Creed Taylor, and one of the greatest cover designers ever), and Ashley Kahn (writer, critic, and journalist for jazz whose books include A Love Supreme, Kind of Blue, and The House That Trane Built).

An excitingly designed, lively, year-by-year history of people and events, covering the whole history of jazz music and its personalities for over 100 years.

The book features many rare images, an accessible, wide-ranging text and an extensive reference section including biographies (from Ammons to Zorn), a list of international Jazz Festivals and events and a carefully selected discography.

The updated, eighth edition of this long-running title features more than 14,000 reviews of CDs and 400 new artist entries. Entries include very brief descriptions of the artists and a list of their recordings, with reviews and ratings by the authors. The lengths of the CD entries vary from very short (label, catalog number, issue date, and performers) to extensive, multiparagraph descriptions of the album's history, reception, and individual songs. The authors are clearly devout jazz historians, and the character of the entries is as much admiring as it is strictly factual. Their detailed descriptions of albums, songs, and even artists' tone colors and interpretations within specific songs are testament to their expertise. They also lament the loss of jazz divisions at many major record companies, leaving independent labels to carry the lion's share of the responsibility for documenting this art form.

Changes from the previous edition are worth mentioning. The artist index, missing from the seventh edition, has returned in response to reader demand, but to maintain what the authors consider a reasonable physical size for the volume, they have eliminated entries "which have seemed to stand still in recent years through the lack of any new releases by the artist in question." In some particularly long entries containing extensive lists of albums, they offer an "in brief" section, which allows for the inclusion of less-important yet still worthwhile recordings by presenting shorter descriptions.

Another important feature is the "Core Collection" selections. Within the listings for some artists, recordings considered essential for a basic jazz library are printed in bold type and described in greater detail. A separate list of these 200 titles would have been useful for those who are looking to build their own collections without having to wade through the entire book to find these seminal works.

The sights and sounds of American jazz. Claxton's photographs of legendary jazz musicians

"Surely the most thorough and imaginative visual record of American jazz at mid-century that we’ll ever see." - Newsweek, New York

In 1960, photographer William Claxton and noted German musicologist Joachim Berendt traveled the United States hot on the trail of jazz music. The result of their collaboration was an amazing collection of photographs and recordings of legendary artists as well as unknown street musicians.

The book Jazzlife, the original fruit of their labors, has become a collector's item that is highly treasured among jazz and photography fans. In 2003, TASCHEN began reassembling this important collection of material — along with many never-before-seen color images from those trips. They are brought together in this updated volume, which includes a foreword by William Claxton tracing his travels with Berendt and his love affair with jazz music in general. Jazz fans will be delighted to be able to take a jazz-trip through time, seeing the music as Claxton and Berendt originally experienced it.

The photographer:

William Claxton (1927-2008) began his career shooting jazz record cover art. His iconic images of Chet Baker, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday and many others reflect his preeminence among photographers of jazz music. Claxton worked for many of the biggest publishers including Life, Paris Match, and Vogue magazines. His work has been shown in galleries around the world, and his photographic prints are now sought after by collectors of fine art photography. He passed away on October 11, 2008 in his hometown Los Angeles.

This work is a loveletter to the birthplace of Jazz: New Orleans. It features highlights from William Claxton's "Jazzlife". New Orleans will never again appear as it does in these rare and stunning photographs by William Claxton taken for the book "Jazzlife" in 1960. While traveling around the United States with musicologist Joachim E. Berendt to record America's original art form, Claxton met and photographed the jazz personalities in every major and minor city, capturing these musicians in their natural environment. Among the most poignant and soulful photographs are these from the colorful melting pot of New Orleans, the city where jazz was born.

Throughout his career, Turner has relentlessly pushed the medium of photography to achieve an extraordinary vision with an uncompromising thirst for bold color and composition. Yet Turner feels that "what really kept my name out there were these record covers." This book showcases 100 covers and their art in close to original size; many of the covers are rare and out-of-print, now collector's items, and connect to a who's who of musical legends—from Count Basie, John Coltrane, and Stan Getz, to Quincy Jones, Freddie Hubbard, and Steely Dan. Turner's covers set new standards for this medium and transformed albums into art objects, sought after both for the music they contain and the cover art they display.

Following the success of Rizzoli's The Blue Note Years, the treasured archive of Francis Wolff photographs has been opened once again to present a previously unseen collection of dynamic images. Included are never-before-published colour images from Wolff's later years of photography. This volume is a collection of the jazz photographs taken from 1941 to 1968 by Francis Wolff, co-founder of Blue Note Records, to document the world's most famous jazz label.

Vignettes tell the story of Blue Note Records; its founders, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff; recording master, Rudy Van Gelder; and many of the labels' great artists -- Jimmy Smith, Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Grant Green, John Coltrane, Lee Morgan, Hank Mobley, Joe Henderson, and Art Blakey, among others.