This work puts together in one volume all the book and scholarly materials related to jazz lives and organizes them in such a way that the reader can see the entire sweep of writings on a given artist and grasp the nature of their contents. The bibliography includes many different kinds of biographical source material published in all languages from 1921 to the present, such as biographies, autobiographies, interview collections, musical treatises, bio-discographies, anthologies of newspaper articles, master theses and PhD dissertations. The main section of the work is an alphabetical listing of sources on individual jazz artists and ensembles. Each jazz musician is given a separate section with birth, death, and primary instrumentation provided. Biographical sources about the artist or ensemble follow. Each entry is annotated to differentiate it from another and to present basic data on the source’s content, such as the inclusion of a discography, bibliography, music examples and transcriptions, footnotes, indexes, illustrations, filmographies and glossaries.