Listen to Jazz!: Exploring a Musical Genre explores jazz as both an American musical genre and a global creative exchange, with a focus on 50 must-hear musicians, composers, bands, groups, albums, and songs.

Rather than focusing on jazz as a solely American genre with a limited set of established jazz greats, Listen to Jazz! explores the diversity of jazz's sounds, compositions, recordings, and styles. A background chapter concisely surveys the genre's sounds, concepts, performance practices, and interactions with the sound recording industry and technological advances in recording. The A-to-Z Must-Hear Music entries include recent jazz musicians from around the world, jazz musicians and recordings that have been marginalized or overlooked, as well as musicians, songs, and albums that have been recognized already for contributing to the defining aspects of specific jazz styles. Chapters on the impact of jazz on popular culture and its legacy, as well as a bibliography, enhance the historical and analytical content found in many jazz resources.

This book stands out for its inclusive and comparative listening-centered approach, often pairing or grouping musicians and recordings in its entries. Music concepts such as improvisation, syncopation, tone color, musical structure, harmonic and rhythmic patterns, and music production techniques are introduced and explained thoroughly, making the book accessible to high school and undergraduate students without any previous musical background while still being of interest to jazz aficionados and scholars.

Any library collection serving longtime jazz enthusiasts will be enriched by this title, and it will do nicely to generate keen interest among jazz neophytes. * Booklist *

Melissa Ursula Dawn Goldsmith is a musicologist, an Adjunct Faculty member in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts of Springfield College in Massachusetts, USA, as well as a Visiting Associate Professor/Lecturer in the Music Department and College of Graduate and Continuing Education at Westfield State University, also in Massachusetts, USA. She is the author of Listen to Classic Rock! (Bloomsbury, 2019) and co-author with Anthony J. Fonseca of Listen to Hip Hop! (Bloomsbury, 2021), both in the Exploring Musical Genres series.