Photographers: Francis Wolff; William Gottlieb; Paul J. Hoeffler; Lee Tanner; Herman Leonard; Chuck Stewart; William Claxton; Austin Hansen; Otto Hesse; Cornell Capa.
Documentarian Ken Burns's ten-part JAZZ is an exhaustive history of that branch of American music, beginning with jazz's inception and moving with care and detail through ensuing decades. Though jazz developments from the '60s onward are given short shrift, the documentary, the five-disc box, and this one-disc distillation, all hit the prime target of the '20s through the '50s nicely. Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk represent the bebop contingent, while Miles Davis fills the cool jazz quota. Noble Sissle, Jelly Roll Morton, and of course Louis Armstrong represent jazz's beginnings, and John Coltrane's "Giant Steps" points towards the direction the music would take in the '60s.
