Visions of Jazz
The First Century
Gary Giddins
Reviews and Awards
Winner of the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, the Bell Atlantic Jazz Award for Book of the Year, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year! Named a Jazz Book of the Century by Jazz Educators Journal
"The publication of Visions of Jazz is a major event because Gary Giddins is our best jazz critic...[It] is the finest unconventional history of jazz ever written--a brilliant, indispensable book."--Alfred Appel, Jr., The New York Times
"One of our most skillful jazz critics offers a monumental work of ambition...[Giddins] brings an unerring critical intelligence to his analyses of the music and a formidable grasp of music theory and practice...This is an important book, one that any serious student of jazz will want to own."--Kirkus Reviews
"This gigantic book of 79 essays amounts, willy-nilly, to a grand, brilliant history of the most American of arts."--The New York Times Book Review, A Notable Book of 1998
"No American writer has ever written better about music, as richly demonstrated in Giddins' Visions of Jazz. This splendid critical history is classic Giddins: breathtaking in its scope, audacious in its erudition, and profoundly mindful of the connection between biography and art."-- Fortune
"Giddins' eclectic range and meticulous attention to detail are nothing less than astonishing. Visions of Jazz is a landmark destined to occupy a permanent niche on the shelf of essential jazz literature."--Grover Sales, The Los Angeles Times Book Review