The opening pages of a book are like the start of any performance. The lights go up. Your skin prickles. Ideally a writer will open big and close bigger, as they say in the theater. In between, he or she must keep it together. In the absence of greatness, as Rebecca Schiff reminded us about rock shows in her story collection “The Bed Moved,” one can always “focus on the bassist’s arms.”

“Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century” is a new book from Nate Chinen, who for many years contributed music writing to The New York Times — this paper’s critics can be elusive soloists, and I’ve never met him — and wrote columns for the magazine Jazz Times.

Chinen’s book opens big enough, with a volley of plunger-muted trumpets. He argues we’ve been living since the turn of the century in “a brilliant new evolutionary phase” of jazz, a “moment of abundance” in which “an explosion of new techniques, accents and protocols” results in a “blur of contingent alignments.” This sense of sinking in prose will come and go.

In between opening and closing moments, “Playing Changes” is largely an annotated guide to the best jazz performers extant. The author’s list incudes the tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington; the bassist, singer and bandleader Esperanza Spalding; the pianists Brad Mehldau and Danilo Perez; the Donny McCaslin Quartet, which played with David Bowie on his final album; the vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant; and the guitarist Mary Halvorson.