本书从19世纪爵士的起源讲起，按时间顺序，分阶段、按专题介绍了爵士乐的兴起、发展、传播、兴衰的过程，近距离观察了爵士与古典、流行音乐等其他艺术形式的相互影响，及爵士的风格、流派、重要人物及乐队、影响后世的作品及音乐厂牌的故事等。

书中按照时间轴，详细罗列了19世纪至今爵士乐的重要时间节点，包括作品创作、公开演唱会、专辑发行、关键人物事件等；同时列出了同时期的世界大纪事，记述了全球背景下爵士乐的发展。

书中收录了近350幅图片，从专辑封面、厂牌标识、宣传海报、曲谱手稿到音乐家、乐手、演出现场的照片，搭配翔实的文字解说，将爵士的历史鲜活呈现。书后附有“音乐人”“音乐术语”“国际爵士音乐节推荐”“推荐聆听”“推荐阅读”等知识拓展内容，可谓是所有音乐爱好者的完整资源宝库。

In 1957, Eugene Smith, a thirty-eight-year-old magazine photographer, walked out of his comfortable settled world—his longtime well-paying job at Life and the home he shared with his wife and four children in Croton-on-Hudson, New York—to move into a dilapidated, five-story loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue (between Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth streets) in New York City’s wholesale flower district. Smith was trying to complete the most ambitious project of his life, a massive photo-essay on the city of Pittsburgh. 821 Sixth Avenue was a late-night haunt of musicians, including some of the biggest names in jazz—Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, and Thelonious Monk among them—and countless fascinating, underground characters. As his ambitions broke down for his quixotic Pittsburgh opus, Smith found solace in the chaotic, somnambulistic world of the loft and its artists. He turned his documentary impulses away from Pittsburgh and toward his offbeat new surroundings. From 1957 to 1965, Smith exposed 1,447 rolls of film at his loft, making roughly 40,000 pictures, the largest body of work in his career, photographing the nocturnal jazz scene as well as life on the streets of the flower district, as seen from his fourth-floor window. He wired the building like a surreptitious recording studio and made 1,740 reels ( 4,000 hours ) of stereo and mono audiotapes, capturing more than 300 musicians, among them Roy Haynes, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Roland Kirk, Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, and Paul Bley. He recorded, as well, legends such as pianists Eddie Costa, and Sonny Clark, drummers Ronnie Free and Edgar Bateman, saxophonist Lin Halliday, bassist Henry Grimes, and multi-instrumentalist Eddie Listengart. Also dropping in on the nighttime scene were the likes of Doris Duke, Norman Mailer, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Salvador Dalí, as well as pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, thieves, photography students, local cops, building inspectors, marijuana dealers, and others. Sam Stephenson discovered Smith’s jazz loft photographs and tapes eleven years ago and has spent the last seven years cataloging, archiving, selecting, and editing Smith’s materials for this book, as well as writing its introduction and the text interwoven throughout. W. Eugene Smith’s Jazz Loft Project has been legendary in the worlds of art, photography, and music for more than forty years, but until the publication of The Jazz Loft Project , no one had seen Smith’s extraordinary photographs or read any of the firsthand accounts of those who were there and lived to tell the tale(s) . . .

《新格罗夫爵士乐词典(第2版)》内容简介：填补了中文版窒自——《新格罗夫爵士乐词典》（第二版）中文版在全球首次出版。一流的工具书——撰稿人是世界各地的杰出学者。它集中了全世界爵士乐专家的智慧。一流的译文——译者任达敏教授是国内爵士乐研究的权威人士，硕士研究生导师。 爵士乐爱好者的福音——有了它，犹如拥有“音乐圣经”，你可以告别对爵士乐似懂非懂的状态.其参考价值难以估量。 图书馆不可或缺的资料——美国图书馆协会发表的评论认为，它在信息的全新性和广泛性方面，远远超过了2000年出版的《牛津爵士乐指南》。“在爵士乐的学术研究方面上升到了一个新的高度。对图书馆而言，它是爵士乐研究不可或缺的资料”。

本书包括爵士乐的先声：拉格泰姆和布鲁斯；百串聚会新奥尔良；风之都市芝加哥；纽约的新人们：大乐队的崛起；尽情摇摆：大乐队的鼎盛时期；比波普革命和硬波谱时代等内容。

《爵士乐速查手册》收集人物之权威、涵盖信息之广泛，足以助你触及爵士乐深邃广博的内涵。拨开雾里看花的迷茫，真正走近这一具有百年渊源历史的优雅艺术。最全面收录：爵士乐史中不可替代的232个擎天巨柱，详细书写爵士乐每一次至关重要的转折。爵士乐简史：引言部分以生动的背景资料串接爵士乐百年发展及各个流派，一气呵成地通读爵士乐成长的方方面面。专家级推荐：涉猎爵士乐所有重要流派，具有代表性的大师及经典作品无一遗漏。学术级资讯：准确详实的乐人乐史资料、简明直观的相关链接及中英文对照索引。最方便阅读：小型开本便于随时随地阅读，独立成篇的精炼结构更方便利用点滴时间。