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Book Reviews

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To cite this Article (2007)'Book Reviews',Jazz Perspectives,1:2,217 — 222

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 Jazz Perspectives
Vol. 1, No. 2, November 2007, pp. 217–222

Book Reviews

Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics. By John Gennari. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006. ISBN: 0226289222 (cloth). Pp. 480. $35.00.

Pearl Harbor Jazz: Change in Popular Music in the Early 1940s. By Peter Townsend.
Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. ISBN: 1578069246 (cloth).
Pp. 256. $50.00.

In one sense, everything we write about jazz could be defined as history. Surveys of
‘‘current’’ activity will tend to cover a period of several years, while reports of ‘‘new’’
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albums (probably recorded last year) or live events (witnessed last week) will be old
news when they appear in print—even by the standard of journalistic deadlines, let
alone the pace of academic journal publishing. We are more aware of this situation
when the subject itself is deemed historical, whether involving musical analysis or
individual biography or even that dubious concept ‘‘oral history,’’ or indeed wide-
ranging surveys such as those under review here.
These two books are each concerned with assumptions made in the past by authors
writing about their contemporaries, as well as subsequent observers dealing with the
same figures retrospectively. Peter Townsend seeks to contrast the two categories of
writer in respect of a specific narrow period, while John Gennari is more ambitious.
What the latter author has attempted is nothing less than a complete account of the
ways in which writers on jazz have mediated between the musicians and listeners, not
always to the benefit of either but usually to their own self-satisfaction. He has
trawled almost everything ever published between hard covers, and reference is also
made to periodicals, especially when controversy raised its frequent head.
Gennari’s scene-setting chapter on the 1930s refers to both the contemporary
comments and the subsequent autobiographies of the leading opinion makers, John
Hammond and Leonard Feather.1 The latter’s first journey from England to New
York, facilitated by the only slightly older but already influential local boy, culminates
at the Savoy Ballroom, where the visitors express their appreciation by standing in
front of the band. Gennari mordantly describes how ‘‘two young white men without
dates, in a room full of good-timing cheer and ecstatic bodily release, position
themselves between the musicians and the audience … caught up in an imagined
sense of privileged intellectual and emotional communion with the music’’ (23).
From here, it is a short step to the internecine struggle between different critical
factions during the 1940s and the later debate over whether bebop was in fact the

1
John Hammond and Irving Townsend, John Hammond on Record: An Autobiography (New York: Ridge
Press, 1977). Leonard Feather, The Jazz Years: Earwitness to an Era (London: Quartet Books, 1986).

ISSN 1749-4060 print/1749-4079 online

DOI: 10.1080/17494060701612021
 218 Book Reviews

revolution that it seemed at the time. The consensus around stylistic consolidation in
the following decade is discussed in terms of open-air festivals and token exposure on
television, contrasted with current commentators’ hopes that, in Gennari’s words,
‘‘jazz should rise above America rather than capitulate to its worst impulses’’ (244).
The 1960s tensions between innovation and Black Nationalism are highlighted by the
writings of Frank Kofsky and Amiri Baraka, including reference to autobiographies
by the latter and his wife Hettie Cohen, both of whom had links to jazz critics of the
previous decade.2 Interestingly, Gennari then studies Ross Russell’s attempts to paint
Charlie Parker as a forerunner of 1960s nationalism, which neatly leads to the further
consolidations of the 1980s, seen partly through the work of Stanley Crouch and Gary
Giddins and their own re-evaluations of Parker.3
This rather schematic summary fails to do justice to the author’s detailed
examination of periods, contexts, and cultural trends in the broader society. One of
Gennari’s strengths is the ability to see a many-sided problem and to make it both
comprehensible and compelling. While initially it seems unwise to begin in the 1930s,
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he does refer back to the previous decade when leaders of the Harlem Renaissance,
such as Alain Locke and W. E. B. DuBois, struggled to appreciate jazz, whereas the
younger Langston Hughes and others naturally empathized with it.4 Gennari also
documents the controversial influence of the well-meaning writer Carl Van Vechten,
without however mentioning fellow whites who tried to describe the actual music,
such as R. D. Darrell or even Henry Osgood.5 A similar pattern is perhaps at work in
the cursory few lines defining Winthrop Sargeant’s pioneering musicological
approach (119) compared to a lengthy treatment of the mythologizing impulse in
Ramsey and Smith’s Jazzmen (122–30).6
Themes such as the primacy of African American creativity, the social attitudes
implicit (or not) in the music, the importance (or otherwise) of the blues influence,
the acceptability of pop music, and the wish to elevate jazz to compositional
respectability tend to recur across the decades, which Gennari duly notes. He is clear-
sighted about the limited vision and unconscious prejudices of some of those he
praises, and describes the default position of the jazz world as ‘‘a hothouse of

2
Frank Kofsky, Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (New York: Pathfinder, 1970). Amiri
Baraka [as LeRoi Jones], Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music That Developed
from It (New York: Wm. Morrow, 1963). Amiri Baraka [as LeRoi Jones], Black Music (New York: Wm.
Morrow, 1967). Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (New York: Scribner’s, 1984).
3
Ross Russell, The Sound (New York: Dutton, 1961). Ross Russell, Bird Lives! The High Life and Hard
Times of Charlie ‘‘Yardbird’’ Parker (New York: Charterhouse, 1973). Stanley Crouch, Considering
Genius: Writings on Jazz (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2006). Gary Giddins, Celebrating Bird: The
Triumph of Charlie Parker (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987).
4
Alain Locke and W. E. B. DuBois, essays from the 1920s, published in magazines such as Opportunity,
The Messenger, and The Crisis. Langston Hughes, ‘‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,’’ The
Nation, June 23, 1926, 692–694.
5
Carl Van Vechten, essays from the 1920s, published in Vanity Fair. R. D. Darrell, record reviews from
the 1920s, published in Phonograph Monthly Review. Henry O. Osgood, So This Is Jazz (Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1926).
6
Winthrop Sargeant, Jazz, Hot and Hybrid (New York: Arrow Editions, 1938). Jazzmen, eds. Frederic
Ramsey, Jr., and Charles Edward Smith (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1939).
 Jazz Perspectives 219

fractious politics and warring stylistic ideologies’’ (253). Despite concentrating on

major writers, he also has time for less-remembered figures, such as Otis Ferguson,
Dan Burley, Sidney Finkelstein, and many more than I can mention here.7 His Ross
Russell ‘‘case study’’ benefits from access to the subject’s letters, with correspondents
as disparate as Rudi Blesh, David Amram, Martin Williams and the notorious Albert
Goldman, and logs a wide selection of reviews of Russell, including negative reactions
from Feather, Hollie West, and Ishmael Reed.
Gennari’s grasp is so extensive that one is tempted to look for omissions, but such
tactics are pre-empted in an introduction that, as well as laying out the territory,
identifies a number of aspects and writers not treated in the main text. Specifically,
developments of the music outside America are excluded, with foreign critics being
mentioned ‘‘only as they appear in the U.S. jazz discourse’’ (15). Hugues Panassié is
shown, for instance, winning friends and influencing attitudes during a pre-war visit,
though another pioneer, Robert Goffin, receives the merest passing mention, despite
spending World War II in the U.S.A. Europeans who eventually settled permanently,
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such as Feather, Dan Morgenstern, and Stanley Dance seem to be accepted as natives.
The introduction also makes a plea for more widespread attention to Latin jazz,
which ‘‘gets more play in books like Jazz for Dummies and The Complete Idiot’s Guide
to Jazz than in the standard college jazz history textbooks’’ (16).
No one is perfect, of course, although the trivial nature of Gennari’s few errors
underlines his overall achievement. For instance, it is anachronistic to say that by
spring 1960 Nat Hentoff ‘‘had been recording [Mingus] for the Candid label’’ (242)
and plain incorrect that the Birth of the Cool was done ‘‘with a 16-piece interracial
band’’ (353). The ‘‘suspicion as to whether [Red] Rodney had fabricated the whole
‘Albino Red’ story’’ in Bird Lives! (325) somehow fails to cast similar doubts on the
book’s Brussels episode; the ‘‘Belgian pharmacist’’ did exist and played a role in Chet
Baker’s career, but Parker never went to Brussels. Gennari’s U.S. focus also causes the
misleading statement that the Russell book ‘‘has been out of general circulation since
the mid-1970s’’ (306); its U.K. publisher kept it continuously available by agreeing to
reprint the Robert Reisner volume that had led to litigation against Russell. Gennari
also confuses Michael James, the English author of Ten Modern Jazzmen, with Duke
Ellington’s nephew of the same name (192), and U.K. magazines could have
furnished ‘‘information on Harrison Smith,’’ the 1920s songwriter and would-be
manager of Ellington (405).
Evidently, we are now in a period when writers talk about writers, not musicians.
Initially, it seems surprising there is not more reference to Gennari’s many published
papers in Townsend’s book, though it does acknowledge the ground-breaking work
of Scott DeVeaux on the jazz canon.8 Townsend’s lengthy and frequently repetitious

7
The Otis Ferguson Reader, eds. Doris Chamberlain and Robert Wilson (Highland Park, IL: December
Press, 1982). Dan Burley, writing in the pages of the Chicago Defender and the New York Amsterdam
News. Sidney Finkelstein, Jazz: A People’s Music (New York: Citadel Press, 1948).
8
Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1997).
 220 Book Reviews

book theorizes that the U.S.A.’s sudden involvement in World War II had a greater
effect on the country’s music and its practitioners than hitherto realized. To this end,
he logs the precise circumstances in which performers learned the news about Pearl
Harbor—including Ellington, Basie, Shaw, and Goodman, but also non-jazz people
like the Andrews Sisters and Woody Guthrie—before describing the changes of the
next 13 months or so, terminating with the first appearances of Frank Sinatra at the
Palladium and Ellington at Carnegie Hall.
The inclusion of figures from beyond jazz buttresses Townsend’s contention that
the swing bands and their in-house vocalists had much in common with other
popular music, including the fields of hillbilly and blues, which both benefited from
ASCAP’s 1941 radio ban. He deplores a widespread inability to recognize this
commonality, blaming a ‘‘semantic decision, to use jazz as an umbrella term covering
the entirety of a disparate and once fiercely divided field’’ (193). Townsend ascribes
this decision to the setting up by Feather and Goffin of a jazz course at the New
School and the publication of Panassié’s second book, both of which occurred in
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1942.9 As a result, he claims, ‘‘At the start of [1941–42] it could be said that nobody
knew what ‘jazz’ was; at the end, at least the outline of a narrative was in place’’ (124).
Yet Feather and Panassié—and others mentioned by Gennari, such as members of the
United Hot Clubs of America or the Hot Record Society, or indeed the contributors
to Jazzmen—were clear that they personally knew what jazz was by the 1930s, even if
some changed their minds later.
Townsend is entitled to question the assumption that jazz ‘‘has a history that no
other music impinges upon, and that has never benefited from its more or less
essentially constant contact with popular music’’ (51). But this too becomes a
semantic decision for the author himself, whereby jazz is in ‘‘contact with popular
music,’’ simply because the swing bands that overlapped with the pop business are
seen by Townsend as representing ‘‘jazz’’; a scant three pages are devoted to the
small-group activity on New York’s 52nd Street, by contrast. Townsend makes
relevant comments about the dependence of jazz players on pop-song material at this
period, and one of his stronger arguments compares the separation of cinematic
auteurs from their commercially-minded cousins, a separation now frowned on by
students of film. Describing the use of popular music in 1940s movies, however, as
being ‘‘indicative … of how easily a musical scene could be fitted into a scenario’’
(184), Townsend might also note how often such scenes were excised down South if
they featured black musicians.
One building-block of Townsend’s overall thesis demolishes the notion that the
significant change brought in by bebop was of a harmonic nature. However, his aim
seems unsure when, ridiculing Feather’s emphasis on the ‘‘arrival’’ of the flatted fifth,
he informs us that ‘‘its use is allied to functions of the tritone that later players
exploited,’’ without further elaboration (139). Relying on other writers for
information about the use of chromaticism in earlier pop-songs, Townsend declares

9
Hugues Panassié, The Real Jazz (New York: Smith & Durrell, 1942).
 Jazz Perspectives 221

that one phrase in two different songs consists of ‘‘the same notes,’’ without
observing that the pitches occur in different keys on different scale-tones (50). An
internal contradiction about the length of Illinois Jacquet’s recorded solo on the 1942
‘‘Flying Home’’ highlights the further contradiction that, if its ‘‘reputation for frenzy
is as exaggerated in the jazz narrative as the reputation of bebop for iconoclasm’’
(168–169), this sits oddly alongside accounts of exciting live performances of the
same piece.
Clearly, no differences between live and recorded bebop or rhythm-and-blues, or
differences between either of these genres and blues and hillbilly, can be
acknowledged without undermining the author’s theory. But it would be reassuring
to see if Townsend checked out his findings with survivors of the period, whether
performers or listeners (Gennari names two dozen informants whom he met as well
as read). Townsend has consulted contemporary newsprint and the materials in
archives such as the Institute of Jazz Studies and the Archives Center of the
Smithsonian National Museum of American History, his delving in Washington
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bringing forth previously unpublished payroll information on the Ellington band.

However, Townsend relies on largely ‘‘jazz’’ and ‘‘pop’’ sources, and corroborating
material on country and blues music is correspondingly sketchy. The only
information on Muddy Waters that interests Townsend is that Waters wanted to
perform pop songs such as Harold Arlen’s ‘‘Blues in the Night’’ for the Library of
Congress folklorist Alan Lomax, information mentioned no fewer than four times.
The same song, ‘‘Blues in the Night,’’ alerts us to the author’s over-reliance on his
printed sources. Learning that Arlen ‘‘decided to undertake research’’ before creating
his hit—a clear instance of early-1940s Hollywood hype, belied by the songwriter’s
previous career—Townsend claims that Arlen ‘‘seemingly had no knowledge of how a
blues song was constructed’’ (60). More seriously, Townsend notes two references in
the oral-history milestone Swing to Bop to Charlie Christian and Jimmie Blanton
jamming together in New York, and concludes that these players ‘‘shared the night-
time life … for much of the two-year period’’ (113).10 This claim is easily disproved
by itineraries for Christian’s and Blanton’s respective employers (Goodman and
Ellington), but one remains mystified by the assertion that Charlie Parker’s spell as a
sideman with Harlan Leonard is ‘‘the main reason for historical interest in Leonard’s
band’’ (92). As well as ignoring Tadd Dameron and others, this statement overlooks
the fact that Parker’s stay lasted a matter of weeks and remains unrecorded and
uncelebrated.
In the previous issue of this journal, I complained about editorial standards for jazz
studies books, and there are clear signs of the writing and editing of this work being
done on-screen. This might explain a few barely grammatical sentences and the fact
that the A. F. M. recording ban, casually telegraphed on pp. 105–106, is not actually
discussed until p. 172. Obviously the day is past and gone when editors at a university
press can spot the twice mis-spelt name of A. Philip Randolph (9, 82), although if

10
Ira Gitler, Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985).
 222 Book Reviews

Townsend traveled to Washington by train, he should have seen a memorial to the

famous labor leader at Union Station. It should also be the duty of an editor to query
whether ‘‘the assumptions of jazz writers and theorists over the past half-century …
have affected the character of jazz as it has come down to the present generation: the
way it is presented, even the way it is performed, as well as the way that people think of
jazz’’ (10; emphasis added). I doubt that many musicians, or indeed Gennari, would
accept such a claim.
While Gennari writes well, with few if any stylistic lapses, Townsend reads like a
hectoring politician, though his agenda is ultimately unclear. It has been suggested
informally that Gennari, or someone else, should next consider an account of
European writers’ views of jazz history and how these differed from those of
American-based authors. As for a follow-up for Pearl Harbor Jazz, maybe an epic
moment such as the Kennedy assassination would bring up similar conflicts in the
way the jazz world viewed itself at the time. Certainly, such a perspective could save
Townsend from his present view that bebop’s fabled ‘‘revolution’’ is ‘‘the only point
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of change in American music given that title so consistently’’ (134).

Brian Priestley
London, United Kingdom

# 2007, Brian Priestley