The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (review)

The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. 2d ed. Edited by Barry Kernfeld. London: Macmillan; New York: Grove's Dictionaries, 2002. [3 vols. ISBN 1-56159-284-6. $550.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliographies.

The end of the last millennium was also the end of the first century of jazz. While opinions concerning the genre's definition, origins, and ownership still vary, there is little question as to its artistic, social, and cultural importance. The newly issued second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz is an appropriate symbol of jazz's continuing growth in stature as a field worthy of research and instruction.

The new edition is in three volumes containing 2,935 pages, more than twice the number of the first edition (1,358 pages in the 1995 reprint). According to the promotional brochure, 2,750 of the 7,750 total entries are new, including 2,250 new biographies. The number of contributors has grown from 230 to 304, each of whom is cited along with a list of respective entries at the end of the third volume. Editor Barry Kernfeld and associate editors Gary Kennedy and Howard Rye are credited with the largest number of articles by far; this is due to the fact that (according to the promotional brochure) most of the "3000 thoroughly revised articles" have been touched by one or another of them.

New to the biographical and group entries are listings of selected films and videos that present the players in performance or interview. Also new, the bibliographies now include Web site addresses for online resources. In the work's introduction, the editor acknowledges a distinction between Web sites as documented bibliography in the print version, and as links that can be updated in an electronic version.

The "Forms" article has added a "List of contrafacts," i.e., jazz melodies written to the harmonic structures of pre-existing popular and jazz songs. The source songs are given alphabetically by title, including composer and date, and each is followed by a list of its harmonic counterparts. George Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm" is by far the most borrowed set of changes, having close to two hundred contrafacts listed.

The "Death Dates" listing from the reprint edition has now been expanded into a full blown sixty-page "Calendar of Births and Deaths" appearing as an appendix to the third volume. Listings are current to the year 2001, and note the recent deaths of Joe Henderson, Billy Higgins, Harold Land, Les Brown, Brother Jack McDuff, J. J. Johnson, and many others.

The general "Bibliography," also an appendix, has more than doubled in size to forty-nine pages. It retains the same general categories: Bibliographies and Reference Materials; Discographies; Other Books; and Periodicals. "Other Books" needs to be broken down into some categorical scheme that distinguishes histories, biographies, analytical studies, criticism, etc., perhaps with subcategories of style periods.

Like the earlier edition, artists' biographical articles, which form the vast bulk of the content, follow a set pattern, providing chronological descriptions of artists' lives and careers, followed by brief characterizations of musical style and development. Larger articles include separate sections for "Life" and "Music," in some cases followed by assessments of influence. Where applicable, notes at the ends of articles refer readers to oral history materials. Articles conclude with lists of works, recordings, films, videos, transcriptions, and studies. The bibliographies are not merely updated from the previous edition, but are newly fleshed out, as evidenced by the fact that many of the entries cite imprints dating from 2001.

In some cases, newly enlarged biographical articles replace briefer ones of the first edition. A good example of this is Paul Bley's entry, rewritten by Kernfeld and Kennedy, expanded from one paragraph to one and one-half pages, with a brief but penetrating stylistic evaluation completely absent from the earlier edition. The rewritten article for Louis Armstrong is likewise expanded and improved by Michael Cogswell, director of the Louis Armstrong House and Archives.

The new edition has...