Gioia — The History of Jazz

Author: Ted Gioia
Title: The History of Jazz
Year: 1997 (3rd edition 2021)
Type: Book (Oxford University Press)

The History of Jazz is a book by the jazz historian and pianist Ted Gioia, published by Oxford University Press in 1997 and revised in 2011 and 2021. It begins the history of jazz with the slave dances of New Orleans’s Congo Square, which the architect Benjamin Latrobe witnessed and described in February 1819, sketching the instruments, and which Gioia calls “an actual transfer of totally African ritual to the native soil of the New World.” From there it surveys the music’s styles and players to the present, and the description All About Jazz carries with its excerpt stresses its attention to the social context of jazz and to the technologies, from the player piano to the record, that helped it spread. Gioia said that the third edition, of 2021, adds the spread of jazz scenes around the world, the growing role of women in jazz and the music’s renewed dialogue with popular culture. NPR’s Natalie Weiner wrote in 2021 that critics from Terry Teachout to Greg Tate had recognized it almost at once as among the most authoritative books of its kind, and that it had sold more than 100,000 copies. Kirkus called it a good choice for introducing someone to jazz while finding it too generous to jazz-rock fusion.

Gioia opens the book’s first chapter, “The Africanization of American Music,” on a scene in nineteenth-century New Orleans: a slave dance in the open area then known as Congo Square, with drummers, a string instrument made from a calabash and a crowd of perhaps five or six hundred people. Benjamin Latrobe witnessed one of these dances on February 21, 1819, wrote an account of it and sketched the instruments, which Gioia writes were virtually identical to those of indigenous African music. The accounts of Congo Square, he writes, provide “a real time and place, an actual transfer of totally African ritual to the native soil of the New World.”¹ He gives two dates for the end of the dances, around 1885 in the traditional accounts and probably before 1870 in more recent research, and writes that their memory shaped the self-image of New Orleans jazz musicians.¹

From New Orleans the survey runs through the music’s styles and players to the present. The description All About Jazz carries with the excerpt names Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong’s OKeh recordings, Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman and Wynton Marsalis among its subjects, says that Gioia “provides much insight into the social context in which the music was born,” and says the book shows how ragtime grew with the spread of parlor and player pianos and how jazz rode the popularity of the record industry in the 1920s.¹

Gioia, a jazz pianist who had taught on Stanford’s jazz studies faculty and the author of two earlier books on jazz, wrote it as his third.¹ Oxford University Press published the book in 1997, revised it in 2011 and published the third edition in March 2021.² Gioia told Natalie Weiner of NPR that the third edition adds the expansion of jazz scenes around the world, which he said had become self-sufficient, the growing role of women in jazz, and the music’s return to a dialogue with popular culture. Weiner wrote that the fifteen pages of recommended tracks at the back of the book were updated for the new edition.² Steve Voce, in Jazz Journal, wrote that the third edition had grown by 150 pages over the second.³

Weiner wrote that critics from Terry Teachout to Greg Tate had recognized the book almost at once as “among the most authoritative and thorough books of its kind,” and that it had sold more than 100,000 copies since its first publication.² Kirkus, in its review of November 1, 1997, wrote that Gioia “spares us the myths and polemics,” that he begins the Africanization of American music farther back than New Orleans’s Storyville district, and that the book would be a good choice for introducing someone to jazz, though it judged him “much too generous to jazz-rock fusion” of the 1970s and 1980s and thought he gave more space than necessary to white dance bands such as the Casa Loma Orchestra.⁴ Philip Heldrich, reviewing it for H-Net in 1998, found that its writing occasionally lacks the enthusiasm and flair of Albert Murray but that its criticism “establishes its own authority.”⁵ Voce called the third edition “his magnificent book” and wrote that Gioia’s “fresh and informed style” is “going to be the benchmark for some time.” He wrote that a large part of English jazz gets a single sentence, which he found unsurprising given the depth of the American account.³

Key contributions

• An account of the beginnings of jazz in the Congo Square slave dances, built on Latrobe’s 1819 account and sketches.
• The beginnings of jazz placed before Storyville, in what Gioia calls the Africanization of American music.
• A single-volume survey of jazz from New Orleans to the present, with attention to its social context and to the technologies that spread it.

See also

• Blues People — Amiri Baraka’s 1963 history of Black music as social history
• The Birth of Bebop — Scott DeVeaux’s history of bebop’s origins, published the same year