Any fan whose ideas of what constitutes jazz aren't confined to the Firehouse Five Plus Two or the Charleston Chasers and who doesn't have the Penguin Guide is barking - mad, that is, not up the wrong tree. First published in 1992 and updated every two years since, the Guide has by now won a deserved reputation as the definitive reference work of its kind.
But it's much more than that. The cumulative effect of its range and authority has made it something even more significant and stimulating. It's a mosaic of dissertation on the ever-broadening scope of a music which, as the bastard child of Africa and Europe, is still busily mating with any other musical idiom that won't reject its advances - and even with some who do. And, as with any mosaic, the detail is what contributes to the overall impression of a book which is part jazz history and part jazz Kama Sutra, with Cook and Morton as the knowledgeable, urbane, wise and witty guides to the activities it describes.
This time the authors have prefaced each entry with a potted melange of history and opinion to give it more context. Inevitably, therefore, argument will surround their elegant praise and equally pithy put-downs of the myriad of jazz musicians they cover. What can't be argued, though, is the fresh, stylish, engaged and engaging writing that sparks almost every entry, and the command of the subject that lies behind it.
Just as certain is the fact that people will chip away at the expectation of omniscience aroused when anyone attempts a guide to anything - my niggle, by the way, is that the marvellous pianist, Lynne Arriale, doesn't get a mention; the Firehouse Five and the Charleston Chasers do, in case you're interested. Ultimately, it doesn't matter. This is one of the great books on recorded jazz; other guides don't even come close.
The Oxford Companion To Jazz. Edited by Bill Kirchner. Oxford University Press, 852pp, £30 in UK
In this heady league, though it's a completely different kind of book on the music, is The Oxford Companion to Jazz. It embraces everything from the music's origins - rather academically delineated by Samuel A. Floyd and William H. Youngren - through its stylistic evolutions and geographic infiltrations to its touchy-feely relationships with ethnic folk and world musics today. And it includes some insights into both the instruments jazz has transformed and the major figures who, not incidentally, wrought such changes and altered the face of the music in the process.
Admirably pitched, it's a jazz fan's essential vade mecum, as relevant to the knowledgeable as it is to those who have just dipped a toe in the water, like the temperature and want to dive in fully clothed. There are some slight disappointments; Laurence Berggreen's comprehensive biography of Armstrong leaves even the great Dan Morgenstern little space to find something new to say, for example - and that's not Morgenstern's fault.
But the compensations far outweigh the minor negatives. Among the many positives are Loren Schoenberg on Lester Young, Gene Lees on Jazz and the American Song, Max Harrison on composing and arranging, Scott DeVeaux on bop, Ted Gioia on cool and West Coast, Brian Priestley on Monk and Mingus, Will Friedwald on jazz-singing since the 1940s and Mike Zwerin on jazz in Europe, if only for his inimitable combination of New World romanticism and Old World cynicism. Experts, every one.
While these names are enough to make aficionados take notice, there are plenty more - like Gunther Schuller, Randy Sandke, Dick Sudhalter and Bill Crow, whose written contributions are informed by their experiences as working musicians and historians. And jazz's relationship with other media is explored, with variable success - appropriate, given the music's uneasy co-existence with all of them, including its ambivalent, on-off one with dance. Warts and all, this is a book to savour.
Jazz: A History Of America's Music. By Geoffrey C. Ward & Ken Burns. Pimlico 490pp, £30 in UK
As is, albeit with a health warning, Ward and Burns's history of jazz. Billed as "the book of the BBC series" it should have benefitted from a tie-in with the broadcasting of its 10-episode, 17-and-a-half-hour-long programme in BBC Television's spring schedule. Although the series has been shown on PBS in the US, the BBC, which is a co-producer, has put back screening until the autumn, leaving the book to fend for itself in the marketplace.
It deserves better. Perhaps its most fascinating aspect, supported by an astonishing amount of archive material, including rare photographs, many never previously published, is its social history. That, naturally, means race and the denial, both systematic and knee-jerk, of the rights of what the current political correctness calls African-Americans - who surely have the right to be called Americans by now?
Side-by-side with this entirely valid social reading, unfortunately, is an undervaluing of the contribution white musicians made - and continue to make - to jazz. In all of this, it's presumably possible to detect the controversial influence of trumpeter/bandleader Wynton Marsalis and his mentor-historian, Stanley Crouch, both contributors to the book and both with their own views on the history of jazz. Those who don't fully share those views would claim, perhaps, that their reading of that history has an agenda and that it has a black face.
The reality is that, as jazz evolved, it built more bridges across the racial divide than it created, and while it's timely to remember the genius of Armstrong, Ellington, Gillespie and Parker, they were colour-blind themselves when it came to making music. Society is catching up with them, and if it still has some distance to go, that shouldn't get in the way of the music.
Nevertheless, this is still a fine book, painstakingly put together. And Marsalis and Crouch aren't the only ones to have their say; Dan Morgenstern, Gary Giddins, Gerald Early - who tackles the race question head-on with hard-nosed common-sense - and Albert Murray also contribute meaningfully to the debate. Anyone who buys this book is unlikely to be disappointed.
Ray Comiskey is editor of Special Reports and Supplements, and Jazz Critic of The Irish Times