Early Jazz, by Gunther Schuller, was the first – and only – serious book on that realm of classic jazz that thrived from 1900 to around 1928, and was revived in 1942, becoming the dominant music in Britain for many years until the advent of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
Schuller’s importance to early jazz is that he treated it seriously and applied his considerable musical learning and status to the analysis of the performances of the pioneers of jazz.
He described “the task of listening to and analysing the hundreds of thousands of jazz recordings made since 1917” as “a monumental one”. Many thousands of jazz fans have been grateful to him for tackling it.
