I agree with the previous reviewer that this book has the look...but not the feel, particularly for jazz's most recent half-century. What is so difficult to understand? What happened with--not to--jazz in recent decades is merely that most of its genuine creative spirits believed that it should reflect its era of creation. Not to run and hide from it, or adhere to an orthodox, rear-view mirror definition. Ironically Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and other celebrated early greats are celebrated for breaking/remaking the pop culture paradigms of their day. Miles Davis does the same thing in a later era and he gets accused by a vocal minority--given much word-time in this book--of something akin to treason.

If in recent decades a particular "jazz" musician heard a connection with an avant-garde sensibility, then the better visionaries (Ornette, Coltrane) effectively bridged that gap. If one sensed a connection with other countries (Brazil, Nigeria, Japan, etc.), then some intuitive artists made THAT work (Stan Getz, Toshiko Akiyoshi, etc.). And if one had an affinity for the more creative efforts in contemporary popular culture, then you got a best-of-many-worlds hybrid, at least from such forward-thinkers as Davis, Cassandra Wilson, Monday Michiru (who is virtually unknown in the land that created jazz--FYI Toshiko is her mom), and others. Concurrently, some musicians seemed to react against this no-holds-barred eclecticism and pick up from points in the now-distant past. That's okay, too...but it's not the only "right" way to bridge jazz's past with it's present and future.

Of course, a majority of tag-along musicians dumbed-down all of these valid scenarios, with results that ranged from commercial-lite to cacaphonic-heavy. Yet particularly the former was true in jazz's early decades, too. Bottom line: the best recent efforts are no less aesthetically timeless than the indisputable great moments of jazz's first half-century.

Sorry to rant, but I think my opinions are far from unique among contemporary jazz fans...in fact, there was already a long line forming before I got in it. I would lukewarmly recommend this book to newcomers, because despite its faults it does attempt to deal with this unique art form in a serious manner, and with a stylish, photo-rich layout. I would just add that a lot of us fans would like to have seen our vision of contemporary jazz better-reflected, rather than not-too-subtly dissed. For one, the Grammy awards been there, done that.

Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns have produced another handsome book, featuring the same opulent look and feel as their earlier, best selling books on The Civil War and Baseball. Their writing on jazz's early history is outstanding. Burns & Co. have also done a magnificent job of culling the nation's photo archives for rare photos of jazz's most famous founding fathers along with many of its long since forgotten contributors. For me, this alone is worth the price of admission.

The big problem with this book is that it provides, at best, a severely truncated and tendentious history of the music. The (generally crisp) narrative simply peters out about 1955. One chapter gives a cursory overview of several developments in the 1950s. The final chapter covers the remaining 40 years in a slim, almost perfunctory twenty or thirty pages. Perhaps the book should have been titled "Jazz: The First 50 Years."

It appears to me that the authors - both autodidacts in the field of jazz - simply lost their nerve. Writing a jazz history in the years after 1950 admittedly gets harder. The music splits into many competing schools and styles. Much of it is simply harder for the uninitiated to listen to. But this is no excuse to gloss over or ignore the great music and musicians who mean so much to jazz fans born after 1940. (Would you believe that Charles Mingus only merits a piddling sidebar?)

The authors seem to have signed onto the orthodoxy of Wynton Marsalis and his ilk. In a nutshell, this holds that jazz took (multiple) wrong turns in the modern era. It stopped featuring the familiar, danceable, toe-tappable shuffling swing that earned it its original popularity. In other words, modern jazz has turned into a musical dead end. The only hope for its salvation is to return to the earlier swing and bop forms and overlay them with a slightly more complex and refined sensibility. It is not hard to discern within the narrative the heavy hand of critics who comprise this school of thought: Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch, and Wynton himself.

In sum, by embracing a cramped, severely circumscribed definition of jazz, the authors utterly fail to understand (much less elucidate) the modern era in jazz. Free jazz was/is more than just angry black nationalist ranting. Fusion, at its best, was not simply a sell-out to triumphalist rock. (And, no, Miles Davis did not "denature" the music when he plugged in.)

For me, the elegiac tone of this book is both insulting and patronizing. Baseball did not begin to die when the Dodgers left Brooklyn. Neither did jazz when Ornette Coleman whipped out his alto sax in New York City in 1959.

By all means, do buy this beautiful book. Just be aware of the stultifying orthodoxy emanating from each of its glossy pages.

As a jazz fan and a professional music retailer, I can recommend this book as a wonderful place to begin one's discovery of jazz or gain more knowledge of the cultural legacy of the music. In conjunction with the excellent video series and a box of cds by the titans written about by Ward, ie. Armstrong, Ellington, Davis, Parker, Holiday, etc., one can have a wonderful adventure either discovering the music for the first time or revisiting and expanding old passions. Those who quibble with its incompleteness run the risk of branding themselves cynics after the fashion of Wilde's definition: "A man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing."

If you're like me, you've always been mystified by the uncanny similarity between Hank Williams and John Lee Hooker, to say nothing of the near-identical vocal qualities of Hank Snow and B.B. King. Luckily, we have a book that explains it all. According to Ed Ward in the first 1/3 of "Rock of Ages," country and rhythm & blues evolved along parallel lines until coming together and producing the country/r&b offspring called rock and roll. Yes, this would certainly explain the vast similaries between Grandpa Jones and Muddy Waters. According to Ward, "the hillbillies were getting radical (musically)" in the early 1950s--hillbillies like Flatt and Scruggs, "Little" Jimmy Dickens, Lefty Frizzel, and Tennessee Ernie Ford. Certainly, when one listen's to Frizzel's "If You've Got the Money I've Got the Time," one can hear a musical revolution in the works. Radical, radical stuff.

As a warm-up to listing such maverick selections as T. Ernie Ford's "Shotgun Boogie," Ward provides scholarly and valuable historical background, including a one-sentence account of the origin of jazz: "In 1902 or thereabouts, someone improvised a countermelody against the one the rest of the band was playing, and the seed of an all-new indigenous American music, jazz, was planted." I frankly prefer this account to the more complicated and stuffy one contained in the 1926 pop song "Birth of the Blues," which features lyrics about new notes pushed through a horn 'til they're born into blue notes, or something like that. That may be more academically correct than Ward's account, but I'd rather be entertained as I learn. And Ward brilliantly sums up the big band era by noting the era's three types of orchestras--"sweet, corn, and swing." By the time rock and roll is born (starting on page 98 with the helpfully-titled chapter, "Rock and Roll Is Born"), we have finished the Ed Ward Roots of Rock Home Study Course, and are ready to digest all of the usual cliches about how rock and roll died (temporarily) in the late 1950s, how Tin Pan Alley took over rock and roll songwriting, etc., and suddenly we're in the 1960s.

Enter Geoffrey Stokes, who tells us all about how "rock" replaced "rock and roll" in 1963, a full 61 years after jazz was invented. (But what happened to "and roll"?)

And so it continues. There are certainly smaller volumes of crank musicology out there, but "Rock of Ages" is probably the most comprehensive collection of pop music mythology to be found anywhere. The authors don't leave a single music-journalistic cliche unturned, and some of the names and titles dropped herein are more than worth checking out. But if you are looking for serious rock musicology, hide thyself from this.

A tour de force of monumental proportions, Geoffrey Stokes has really turned an entire generation of music into a concise yet informative book that truly stimulates the intellect of even the faintest fan of American rock & roll. Clever anecdotes reveal each musician's voice behind timeless classics of the modern era. A must have for all; this book can easily complete a collection or start it. I recommend it with ALL of my critical expertise.