From Frank Sinatra to Sun Ra, from the jazz age to middle age, with thoughts on everything in-between, Francis Davis has been writing about American music and American culture for more than twenty years. His essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and the Village Voice among countless other publications from coast to coast. And now, for the first time, here are his most important writings of his impressive career-the quintessential Davis on everything from why Rent set musicals back two decades, to what Ken Burns should have filmed. And Davis's writing is as enjoyable as the music of which he writes. The New York Times Book Review has compared Davis's work to "a well-blown solo." Jazz critics of two generations weigh in with a career retrospective from the younger one, a collection of recent pieces by the older. Davis says the 25 years he has been writing about jazz have been a period of artistic and popular decline that he blames on "the entrenched tastes of the jazz faithful"--a statement the first part of which will draw the ire of young avant-garde enthusiasts while the second rouses the wrath of the elders whose patronage keeps mainstream jazz alive. Davis obviously isn't afraid to make waves but deserves to be read because, like the late Martin Williams, he writes about music for nonmusicians without substituting purple prose for audibly verifiable description and because, like venerable New Yorker jazz writer Whitney Balliett, he communicates musicians' personalities pungently and believably. In this collection, he does both for the music and the persons of figures ranging from old Sonny Rollins to young Don Byron, from young traditionalist Wynton Marsalis to old avant-gardist Charles Gayle. His critical acumen shines brightly, too, in the three pieces on musical theater and the commentaries on movies and comedians that conclude the book. Before becoming everybody's favorite civil libertarian, Hentoff was a jazz critic, whose Jazz Life (1961) introduced the music to many baby boomers. Lately proclaimed the first nonmusician jazz master by the National Endowment for the Arts, he now writes on jazz not for erstwhile haunts Down Beat and the Village Voice but, judging from the provenances of most of his new book's contents, for the Wall Street Journal . In line with the Journal's status as a newspaper, these pieces are news-story short and, in line with the Journal's market orientation, contain consumer guidance to recordings, books, and music organizations. Most focus on particular musicians, though some are topic driven, such as "Testosterone Is Not a Musical Instrument," on the continuing resistance to women in jazz except as singers and pianists. Unfaithful followers of Hentoff on music may be surprised, but very pleasantly, by the pieces on his other "American Music" passion, hard country--by the likes of Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, and Delbert McClinton. Ray Olson Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "Francis Davis has long combined Gary Giddin's musical acuity with Whitney Balliett's literary flair." Francis Davis is a contributing editor of the Atlantic Monthly and writes regularly for the New York Times and the New Yorker . He is the author of the acclaimed books Outcats and History of the Blues and a biography of John Coltrane (Knopf). He lives in Philadelphia.