Description:
There are at least three kinds of jazz books: text-laden historical or critical overviews; photo-laden visual chronicles; and collections that detail the operations of a jazz musician, how a musician technically or creatively acts as a pioneer. Masters of Jazz Guitar dabbles happily in all three areas. It's a coffee-table book first, with fantastic, evocative photographs strewn throughout. You rarely see a collection in jazz that features photos of folks like Hungarian six-stringer Atila Zoller just pages away from far better known quantities like Al DiMeola, but the visuals here are just a sweet coating. Inside, the text is even more delicious, with 25 chapters breaking down the jazz guitar traditions, from Django Reinhardt to Wes Montgomery, Pat Metheny, and many more. In addition, the chapters are authored by a slew of great British critics, including Stuart Nicholson and Brian Priestley, each of whom demonstrates a liberal cut in the jazz tradition, an idea of the genre that easily spans swing, bop, free jazz, and the chilly abstractions of Derek Bailey. For the guitar player, this is a splendid and entertaining resource. For the jazz fan, it's all that and more. --Andrew Bartlett
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