Stuart Nicholson, Jazz Rock: A History - Starting with Bill Laswell's foreward, this is a wonderfully intelligent and comprehensive account of the earliest influences of rock in jazz and jazz in rock, right up to 1997, the year before the book's publication. Nicholson digs deep to find where jazz and rock met for the first time. It's impossible to put a date on it but everyone from the Beatles to Cream are implicated.

The book's sensibilities are encapsulated within one of its chapters that deals entirely with Jimi Hendrix, important for building the bridges between jazz and rock, blurring the boundaries and defining the new soundscape for fusion music.

The whole of the first chapter concentrates on the London-based blues scene of the early 60's. Another chapter is devoted to the Mahavishnu Orchestra while other chapters deal wholey with Miles Davis, Weather Report and Return To Forever. JM is mentioned very little after Mahavishnu II, other than Mahavishnu IV with Bill Evans (Evans joined John McLaughlin's relaunched Mahavishnu Orchestra in 1983, but any expectations aroused by the memory of one of the great jazz-rock bands of all time were soon dashed by the group's albums "Mahavishnu" and "Adventures In Radioland") and as a guest on Miles Davis albums. Miles Davis also included a JM song Pacific Express in his 1985 live set. JM's next "return to authentic jazz-rock fusion" is identified as Jazz Jungle from The Promise.

An important link is established between Lifetime and Jimi Hendrix, and places Lifetime above Davis, Burton, Lloyd, Hardy and Coryell for influence and achievement with electric jazz-rock. The Mahavishnu Orchestra mark 1 is placed central to jazz-rock development, while future incarnations and musical forays are considered less worthy.

The importance of the book is not so much its well-researched background on each artist or group of artists, but moreso the historical and social context of the music, and the identification of mutualistic influence between the bands. The music's distribution and impact is partly delivered by extensive use of advertising blurb, review quotes, media clips and Billboard ratings - sometimes to distraction.

The story-telling pace is sacrificed in the name of completeness and frustratingly little space is given to album and song descriptions; Jerry Goodman's Flock is one of the bands receiving most attention with a dozen lines about their second album Dinosaur Swamps. Emphasis is rather on band membership and family trees, a fascinating subject but essentially a list of names nonetheless.

There are some silly mistakes, noteably a mention of "Brooklyn-born guitarist Dave Liebman" and that Time Remembered involved a string quartet - true but not quite!. Also Journey To Love partners JM with Jeff Beck (again true - but not on the same cuts) and there's a handful of typos for which the proofreader should be soht!

In a section of the book that over-stretches the boundaries of jazz-rock into pop and crossover music, Nicholson skilfully negotiates the maze of material from the late 70's, 80's and 90's, dipping in only long enough to feature a particularly interesting artist, a popular TV theme tune or a freak of nature. Kenny G is allocated 9 lines of text.

The book tires towards its completion with another chapter dedicated to Miles Davis, to round up his later life - but it is written as a biographical essay and not as an extension of this book's theme. Establishing Davis' popularity as a precursor for resurgence of interest in jazz-rock and fusion is valid, but focussing on his retrospective Montreux appearance with Quincy Troupe, flavoured with first-hand accounts and pathos is pure sentimentality.

The book runs to its conclusion with well-informed sections about Bill Laswell, John Zorn and Madeski, Martin and Wood and other recent developments in jazz-rock, whilst great pains are taken to ensure that no big names are omitted as an afterthought, squeezing in sections on Zappa, Beefheart, Carla Bley and Gil Evans amongst others, alas with little of the lateral connectivity that threaded the earlier chapters.

The text is suitably annotated with black and white photographs, a good number snapped by the author himself. The book is rounded off with an extensive, selected discography providing many starting points from which to explore the music detailed within. I'm not sure about this 85-page discography. My personal preference would have been for more to have been said about the featured albums in the text rather than this list of "Artist's Name", "Album Title", "Record Label", "CD Label" and "Original Release" date. It provides neither a comprehensive discography for the artists, nor a structured guide through the development of jazz-rock music, although it does claim to embellish the book's chapters - but how can this be achieved with so little to go on? For example, simply knowing what label a certain release is under doesn't usually make it any easier to get hold of a copy. Without adding to the information presented earlier, the discography appears superfluous.

Jazz Rock by Stuart Nicholson is a thorough, but slightly imbalanced, compendium of probably just about everyone who's had some input into jazz-rock. If you want to be clued up on the subject - go get this book.