A review by dkmode
Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century by Nate Chinen

5.0

A wonderful survey of jazz from Coltrane's death to now. Playing Changes smartly rejects a linear approach and instead starts from a historical turning point - the ascendency of Wynton Marsalis and the canonization of institutional jazz - and goes from there, tracking the various offshoots of jazz and the ways in which they intersect with each other and the genre at large. At times the information can be overwhelming, but Chinen ends every chapter with a simple list of 5 albums that represent the concepts therein, and eventually ends the book with a list of ~120 albums that have shaped jazz in the 21st century. While I wish more space was given to jazz outside of the States - jazz developments in China, India, and Europe are clumsily shoved into one chapter when this topic really deserves an entire book - it still manages to work as a broad examination of what this genre means now, not just when it was dominant, and the ways in which it's been pushed and pulled by individual musicians and movements over the past 50 or so years. I wish more jazz musicians and pedagogists would read it.