Jazz

In addition to ebooks you can access through the catalog, the library holds many print books about jazz and jazz musicians. Because jazz crosses over with popular, classical, and traditional American genres, and because the Library of Congress system does not place all jazz books together, you will find books about jazz scattered throughout the ML and MT sections on the third floor. Remember that ML is for books about music history and musicians and MT is for music theory, technique, and pedagogy.

Some locations where you will find books about jazz and jazz musicians are: 

• biographies of composers, ML410,
• biographies and memoirs of performers, ML416-429,
• histories of musical instruments and instrumental music, ML460-1093, 
• histories of vocal music, ML1400-3275. 

You will find a good number of books about popular music, jazz, and traditional music clustered in the range from ML3470-3776.

And throughout the MTs you will find books about jazz orchestration and arranging, instruments and techniques for playing them, and vocal technique.

We have hundreds of jazz CDs and LPs! Our physical recording collections are not browsable, so use the catalog to look up the artists you are interested in, get the call numbers for the recordings you would like to listen to, and ask at the 4th floor circulation desk to have the items pulled for you. You can listen in our Media Lab or check the recordings out to listen to at home.

We have a number of useful reference works for students of jazz, but due to the crossover nature of the genre and the way the Library of Congress call number system works, they are scattered throughout our collection. Reference works are located on the fourth floor of the library and must be used in the library. A couple highlights include: