New York, NY (Top40 Charts/Shore Fire Media) The highly anticipated 'Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology' box set, available March 29, 2011 via Smithsonian Folkways, is the most definitive musical history of the genre to date. Here's a look at how in-depth and detailed the collection is, for aficionados and first-time fans alike.
'Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology' - by the numbers:
* 111 tracks covering an 85 year span (1917-2003)
* 6 CDs and 7 hours 45 minutes of music
* 200 page book
* Covers New Orleans, Dixieland, big band, cool, swing, bebop, hard bop, free, funk, fusion, Latin and contemporary jazz
* 129 photographs, many rare
* 666 different musicians from 19 countries performing 61 different instruments
* 80% of the tracks (90) were not included in the now out-of-print versions of The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz
* As many as 20% of the tracks estimated to be not readily available elsewhere commercially (CDs or Downloads)
* 7 years in the making
* 43-person advisory panel and 35 contributing writers
* 145 total contributors (including staff, notes writers editors, designers, audio engineers, image specialists, interns, and volunteers)
Pre-Orders Available at folkways.si.edu/jazz, including a package with JAZZ poster and t-shirt.
Think you know jazz? Visit the popular quiz-site Sporcle.com to see how many songs from JAZZ: The Smithsonian Anthology you can recognize. There is a 25-song version and the full 111-song ultimate challenge.
JAZZ: The Smithsonian Anthology is a Smithsonian Folkways production with financial assistance by:
The Herb Alpert Foundation
Herzog & Co., Inc.
Smithsonian
National Museum of African American History and Culture
Smithsonian
National Museum of American History
For more information and the full 'Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology' track list:
https://shorefire.com/clients/folkways/
https://www.folkways.si.edu/jazz