Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of its Second Century

Giddins has been recognized as the Duke, the Count, the Earl of jazz writers.... No one puts it together like Giddins, whose writing is an unmatched combination of big ideas, witty wordsmithery, historical insight, and musicological know-how.... Thumbing through 'Weather Bird' is like listening to some of your old favorites--and being astonished as you still hear new things.... Giddins has set the bar for jazz scholarship so high no one is likely to top it.... His jazz column was a thing to be treasured--as is this collection. --Will Friedwald, New York Sun

When it comes to selling the music he loves, he's a gifted evangelist. That's no small thing. --JazzTimes

A hefty but absorbing collection of the ex-Village Voice critic's recent jazz criticism. As a dilettante jazz listener, I learned something from every paragraph. --Alex Ross, therestisnoise.com

Giddins is opinionated but generous, with the laudable ability to capture the essence of a performer's style in vibrant language that makes the music described seem almost audible. --Publishers Weekly

The breadth and depth of Giddins's knowledge is extremely impressive, his ear is astounding, and his masterly style routinely achieves the near impossible in writing engagingly about something that inherently eludes description.... The book stands on its own, but taken with Giddins's acclaimed Visions of Jazz: The First Century, it affords the reader a highly accessible, personal, and perceptive portrait of the development of jazz and its towering figures (and some lesser-known but significant talents), from its beginnings to the present. --Library Journal

Giddins has a voice. It's full of bold assertions and blunt putdowns. He loves the music to death--that feeling oozes through these 600-plus pages, though Giddins balances emotion with intellect, as does jazz itself. He's a scholarly fanatic, obsessing on the music endlessly, at times comically, fusing a school kid's ebullience to dissertation-like detail. He seems to work as hard at understanding the music as musicians do at mastering jazz's labyrinthine systems. --San Jose Mercury News

Giddins' insights are so compelling and his writing so crisp that matters like past, present and future become moot.... Like so many of the virtuosos he writes about, Giddins has an explosive way of expressing ideas, sometimes complex ones. --David Rubien, San Francisco Chronicle

Giddins has probably become the standard by which all other jazz writers and critics have to be judged.... The second volume of Giddins' extraordinary work confirms fully that he was probably the greatest regularly appearing working critic of the music in its history. --The Buffalo News

Giddins can be read for the sheer pleasure of watching him surround music with language. He's passionate and erudite, a marvelous historian, and always a splendid companion -- an essayist in the disguise of a critic. --Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn

Gary Giddins is probably the best, most acute, most sheerly explanatory critic of jazz music ever born. These generous, thoughtful essays from the Village Voice and elsewhere resound with the sense of discoveries made during the act of writing. --Peter Straub

Anyone interested in the artistry and importance of jazz should read this book. Anyone interested in the history of our culture should read this book. Gary Giddins eloquently deciphers the mysteries of jazz in Weather Bird. I was enterained by every page. I learned something and was inspired by every page. --Michael Connelly