More than fifty major figures in jazz preserve for posterity their recollections of how jazz moved from the big band era in the late 1930s and 1940s into the modern jazz period.

Back in the early 1940s, late at night in the clubs of Harlem, a handful of jazz musicians began to experiment with a style that no one had ever heard before. The music was fast, complicated, impossible to play for many of the older musicians—but it soon became the lingua franca of jazz music. They called it bebop, and as the years went by, it became even more popular. Today it reigns as perhaps the best-loved style of jazz ever created. Ira Gitler conveys the excitement of this musical birth as only someone who was there can. In The Masters of Bebop, Gitler traces the advent of what was a revolution in sound. He profiles the leading players—Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillepie, Max Roach—but also studies the style and music of the first disciples, such as Dexter Gordon and J. J. Johnson, to reveal bebop’s pervasive influence throughout American culture. Revised with an updated discography—and with a new chapter covering bebop right up through the end of the twentieth century—The Masters of Bebop is the essential listener’s handbook.

A thrilling collection of photographs that reveal the people, places, and events of Jazz's Golden Age the period from the late 1930s through the 1940s during which the music underwent enormous growth and transformation. Two hundred b&w photographs are included, accompanied by Gottlieb's recollection

z musicians who define the state of the art today. Of all music, jazz best represents the diversity and dynamism of 20th century America, and this volume pays homage to the virtuosos who have created this extraordinarily rich music. Photos.