Table of Contents

Foreword ix
 
1 Change of the Guard 3
2 From This Moment On 31
3 Uptown Downtown 49
4 Play the Mountain 72
5 The New Elders 86
6 Gangsterism on a Loop 101
7 Learning Jazz 119
8 Infiltrate and Ambush 137
9 Changing Sames 156
10 Exposures 183
11 The Crossroads 200
12 Style Against Style 224
 
Afterword 238
The 129 Essential Albums of the Twenty-First Century (So Far) 243
Acknowledgments 249
Notes 251
Index 259

About the Author

NATE CHINEN has been writing about jazz for more than twenty years. He spent a dozen of them working as a critic for The New York Times and helmed a long-running column for Jazz Times. As the director of editorial content at WBGO, he works with the multiplatform program Jazz Night in America and contributes a range of coverage to NPR Music. An eleven-time winner of the Helen Dance—Robert Palmer Award for Excellence in writing presented by the Jazz Journalists Association, Chinen is also coauthor of Myself Among Others: A Life in Music, the autobiography of impresario George Wein. He lives in Beacon, New York, with his wife and two daughters.

Reviews

"Brilliant. Incisive. Jazz lives on and on and on, folks.”—Sonny Rollins

“Sharp in style and warm in feeling, Nate Chinen’s virtuoso survey dispenses with the familiar agendas and polemics that have too often boxed in writing on contemporary jazz. He follows the music where it goes and exults in its plurality of voices.”—Alex Ross, author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

“Chinen’s passion for the art form and deep understanding and knowledge of jazz make for a fascinating read. His firm support of the music and belief that the changes taking place within it will continue to serve it well—solidifying jazz as a global mode of communication without bounds—are truly uplifting.”—Herbie Hancock

"Chinen has excellent taste in unruly new sounds and big, bent ears, and you’ll want to make a playlist."—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"A terrific book about the shape of contemporary jazz, and right now is a terrific time to read it” —The Washington Post

"A perfectly timed, well-tuned chronicle of the past, present, and future of jazz...One of the essential music books of the young century, so far”—Slate

"Chinen's elegant, evocative writing is a mesmerizing staple of this essential book... Like the best nonfiction, Playing Changes will motivate jazz diehards and neophytes alike to discover what's out there and what's on the horizon."—PopMatters


"A really first-rate jazz critic has been necessary to lay out how vital it remains beneath all the encrusted misperceptions... It's always wonderful to read the results when artists and writers need each other."—Buffalo News

"A brilliant and wide-ranging new history of jazz...  Chinen’s virtuoso jazz history will drive readers to listen to the music anew, or for the first time."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)