Philosophy of Jazz

Kevin Le Gendre is a journalist, broadcaster and writer. He is deputy editor of Echoes and also contributes to Jazzwise, Music Week, Vibrations, as well as BBC 3's Jazz line-up and BBC 4's Front Row. He is the author of Don't Stop the Carnival: Black Music in Britain and Hear My Train A Comin': The Songs of Jimi Hendrix.

'If you had to recommend just one book on jazz history to a neophyte, which would it be? Ted Gioia's The History of Jazz (Oxford University Press, 1997) is rightly regarded as a definitive account, but at nearly 600 pages it may deter readers looking for a lighter introduction. What if the essential information could be distilled into something closer to 100 pages? That is precisely what Kevin Le Gendre achieves with The Philosophy of Jazz—a compact, engaging primer that explains the when, where, who, why, and how of jazz in clear, succinct language' - Ian Patterson, AllAboutJazz.com'His final observation is well put, and worth pondering. The rapid evolution of music performed under the label “jazz” means that multiple jazz vocabularies co-exist. Well-schooled musicians know this well, and can deepen our sense of a certain fluidity of past and present. As Le Gendre puts it, for some artists, “Everything previously stated can be relevant to what is yet to be stated. This teasing back and forth, this alchemy of old begetting new, a composition of then, informing one of now, is integral to the music”.At which point it becomes apparent that there is a nice reflexivity about the text Le Gendre offers here – this is not just an idiosyncratic meander through genres, periods and styles (though it is that), it is also a book written in a way that mirrors its conclusion. I’ve not dipped into the other titles in this series, but I doubt if any of them take the trouble to instantiate their own argument so neatly.' - Jon Turney, UKJazzNews.com