Modern jazz recordings reference?

December 26, 2012 3:17 AM

Which book should I buy to replace the (non-existent) 10th edition of "The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings"?

I own both the 7th and the 8th editions of "The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings" by Richard Cook and Brian Morton and I am very pleased by those. The 8th edition was published in 2006, and recently I decided to update it to the more modern edition. To my dismay I discovered that after the 9th edition the book is effectively discontinued, replaced by mere 768 pages of "The Penguin Jazz Guide: The History of the Music in the 1001 Best Albums". That book, according to Amazon reviews (which give it less than 2 stars out of five), is no longer encyclopaedic, lacks the index, does not list performers in alphabetic order and is useless as a reference.

Is there any other book which I can buy? I'd like it to be:
- comprehensive,
- useful as a reference,
- cover at least 2004-2010 period,
- resemble "The Penguin Guide" as much as possible, :)
- for XX century recordings I can use the old books so a book with XXI century jazz only will do fine.

Any advices?

posted by avysk to Media & Arts (1 answer total)

I will be monitoring this thread since I could use the same thing. In the meantime, allmusic.com is my go-to site for information and reviews of popular music, including jazz. Unfortunately very recent jazz is one of the areas where its coverage isn't as great (recent records are almost all listed but aren't always reviewed).
posted by dfan at 6:28 AM on December 26, 2012