Mid-fifties San Francisco. A jazz critic and a jazz disc jockey sit for hours philosophizing about the music they know so well. A west coast jazz festival -- that's what the world needs. Something that will show people the meaning of jazz. Real jazz. By 1958 it is in place.\nToday the Monterey Jazz Festival, the dream of radio man Jimmy Lyons and San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ralph J. Gleason, is synonymous with the finest music the world of jazz has to offer. Scores of performers. The known. The unknown. Three September days full of sound emanating from the California town John Steinbeck called \"a poem ... a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.\" And while today's Festival is a dream-come-true for any jazz lover, its history is rich with drama, humor, catastrophe and success, a collage of emotion, compromise and risk-taking. And in these pages, every aspect jumps off the page in words and glorious black-and-white photographs. A special four-color gatefold features selected Monterey Jazz posters.\nIn Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary Years, jazz journalist William Minor tells the story of the oldest, continuously performed jazz gathering in the world, the story of forty weekends of jazz that welcomed the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Carmen McRae, Janis Joplin, Herbie Hancock, Wynton Marsalis and Joshua Redman.\nPhotographer and photo editor Bill Wishner has collected more than one hundred fifty rare images of the performers and performances that have highlighted the Festival over nearly half a century. Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary Years includes a complete listing of all musicians who have performed on the Monterey stages from 1958 to 1997. This is the definitive history of the Festival that defines jazz.