When I saw this book at the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, I knew that I had to buy it, even if it did cost $40. Because it provides a number of answers I've been looking for for a long time.
It's easy to find lots of books that tell you about various jazz musicians, or give you the history of various movements and schools in jazz. And in music stores I could find books for musicians that had lots of chords in them, and talked about such things as chord progressions and syncopation. But these books were difficult to get much out of if one didn't actually play an instrument. Despite all my years of piano music, I still don't read music in the sense of being able to look at written notes and knowing what they will sound like.
What I was looking for more than anything else, and not finding, was a basic explanation of the structure of jazz. About ten years ago, I took a weekend course from a guy who taught people with no previous experience how to play blues and boogie-woogie piano. That was very useful to me, because now when I listen to blues I can actually hear the 12-bar structure.
But I couldn't find anywhere that explains what the jazz structure is. I would hear jazz musicians, for instance, talking about the ``bridge,'' but I didn't know what that meant.
Kernfeld's book answered my simple questions about jazz structure and told me a lot more. For instance, my first assumption was that I could skip through the chapter on rhythm fairly quickly, because I understand the basic principles of rhythm pretty well already. Or so I thought, until I read what Kernfeld had to say about jazz rhythm. For instance, I had never really before paid attention to something as simple as two-beat (two-four time) versus four-beat when listening to jazz. If I'd thought about this at all, I'd assumed that two-beat is only used in old things like Souza marches. But Kernfeld gives some quite modern examples of the use of two-beat, and points out that it is a standard device for ballads.
The book comes with a CD containing 21 cuts illustrating the various topics in the book, and listening to these pieces after reading Kornfeld's commentary gave me exactly what I wanted. It did what I think any kind of artistic criticism does at its very best -- it enabled me to notice things about the music that I hadn't noticed before.
The chapters of the book are listed below. The chapter titles sound fairly basic, but I, at least, found all of them quite enlightening, even the ones (such as Arrangment) that I had assume I would have slight interest in.