To quote an old friend, the novelist Alan Hewat, "Jazz is not plumbing. You can buy books that'll tell you what plumbing is and how to make your own. Likewise, interest tables, orgasms and organic pastries. But not jazz, which is one of the ineffibles, the things of gut and feeling that you can't pin directly with words."

Nonetheless, jazz writers try, if only to share their love for one of America's greatest cultural achievements. And Ken Burns has tried, with words, pictures and video, in a monumental nineteen-hour documentary that will air on PBS from January 8-31. The companion volume by Geoffrey Ward, Jazz: a History of America's Music is as beautifully produced as were The Civil War and Baseball. We're taking the occasion to recommend some of the best books on jazz; we hope they'll broaden or deepen your pleasure in the music.

People new to the music, as well as fans, need histories and guides. The best available history is Ted Gioia's The History of Jazz, which filled a conspicuous gap in jazz literature. From "The Prehistory of Jazz" to "Freedom and Beyond," Gioia's encyclopedic knowledge is evident throughout, and he has condensed a century of history into a well-balanced survey. The Oxford Companion to Jazz, edited by Bill Kirchner, is a collection of 60 essays by top jazz writers and musicians that surveys the evolution of jazz in specially commissioned profiles of each style and period. There is no better guide to recordings from 1920-1970, the "classic period" of the music, than Tom Piazza's Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz. It's a map of the territory: how jazz developed, who played it and their best recordings. Covering 800 recordings (with information about their current availability), it is an invaluable companion.

There are biographies and autobiographies of Armstrong, Basie, Holiday, Parker, Gillespie, Miles, Mingus, Sarah Vaughn and Billy Strayhorn, to mention a few of many, but one of the best is the recent biography of Duke Ellington, Reminiscing in Tempo. Stuart Nicholson pieces together the life of the major 20th century composer from his own writings and reminiscences from those who knew him best-his business associates, his family and the musicians who played in his orchestra.

Critical writing on jazz is voluminous, and perhaps the best way to start is with one of the anthologies. Reading Jazz, edited by Robert Gottlieb, is an exhaustive collection divided into three parts: autobiography, portraits and criticism. Writing Jazz, a magnificent and important anthology of African American writing, includes writing by musicians from Armstrong and Bechet to Gillespie and Mingus, and by critics, historians and writers including Ralph Ellison, Wole Soyinka, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez, Malcolm X, Albert Murray and Eileen Southern. For criticism by a single writer, try Gary Giddens' Visions of Jazz: The First Century. In 79 portraits he gives us an erudite, witty and eloquent look at the artists themselves.

You cannot understand jazz without understanding the cultural and racial history in which it was created. In Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights, David Margolick, four-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, has written the story of the song about lynching that became one of Holiday's most famous recordings. Blues People and Black Music, by Leroi Jones and Amiri Baraka, and Stomping the Blues by Albert Murray are wide-ranging examinations of jazz, blues, African American culture and America's racism; they are as breathtakingly beautiful and profound as the music they illuminate.

The literature of jazz is dauntingly large, but leave time for my current favorite, Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece. In telling the inside story of one of the greatest recording sessions in the annals of jazz, Kahn allows us to get as close to the experience of making the music as most of us are ever likely to get. Don't miss it!

(Titles in bold are part of this month's Select Seventy and discounted 20%)