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John Edward Hasse is the curator of American Music at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, founder of national Jazz Appreciation Month and the author of "Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington."

So for jazz lovers, here are his five favorite books about the music.

By Bob Blumenthal

(Collins, 2007)

A book attempting an overview of a subject with nearly a century of rich history and with three-quarters of a million recordings is a daunting undertaking. But as I began reading "Jazz: An Introduction to the History and Legends Behind America's Music," I soon recognized that Blumenthal had produced the single best compact introduction to jazz currently available.

And he did it in fewer than 200 pages of engaging, clearly written prose, accompanied by handsome illustrations and a short but useful glossary.

By Alan Lomax

(Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1950)

Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton was central to the emergence of jazz in the early 20th century, but he was also a colorful character — he wore a diamond in one of his teeth — and a gifted raconteur.

At the invitation of folklorist Alan Lomax in 1938, Morton recorded reminiscences, anecdotes, boasts and songs in what amounts to a performed autobiography. In 1950, Lomax converted the recordings into this book. You also can read "Mister Jelly Roll" and listen to the original recordings in Rounder Records' "Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax."

By Whitney Balliett

(University of Mississippi Press, 2006)

For more than 40 years, Whitney Balliett was the jazz critic of the New Yorker magazine. His death last year silenced one of the most literate and lyrical of writers on the arts. "American Musicians II" — an expanded version of the original from a decade earlier — includes all of Balliett's New Yorker profiles of jazz musicians, from pioneers Sidney Bechet and Fats Waller to modernists Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman.

Balliett makes you feel that you are at his side, listening to great musicians speak, viewing them not only as gifted artists but also as entirely human; his word portrait of clarinetist Pee Wee Russell is titled "Even His Feet Look Sad."

By Gunther Schuller

(Oxford, 1991)

Twenty years after his pioneering "Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development," Gunther Schuller turned to the swing era, a glorious period in American music, when Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington developed an idiom that was accessible yet also innovative and artistically satisfying.

Before Schuller, much writing about jazz had been biographical, anecdotal or impressionistic; Schuller took a more disciplined approach. He listened to 30,000 recordings to analyze and astutely assess the music itself — for example, devoting 110 pages and 62 musical examples to his discussion of Ellington's work.

"The Swing Era" might be uneven as a history of the music, but it shines as a highly opinionated and erudite survey from a brilliant mind with a golden ear and a precise pen.

Edited by Robert Gottlieb

(Pantheon, 1996)

Don't be put off by the massive size of this anthology. You can dip into its 1,068 pages one piece at a time. Robert Gottlieb, former editor of The New Yorker, has judiciously selected and excerpted 106 examples of the most memorable English-language writing on jazz, culled from books and magazines between 1919 and the 1990s. In the autobiographical entries, we learn about the thoughts and experiences of musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Anita O'Day and Miles Davis.

In "Reading Jazz" we also encounter the work of gifted writers, including Ralph Ellison, Martin Williams, Nat Hentoff, Gary Giddins and Dan Morgenstern.