Recommending Texts for a course on the History of Jazz

[Face of the Bass]

So next semester for the first time I am teaching an upper-level undergraduate course on the History of Jazz. In a way it is an offshoot of a course I currently offer on black music more generally, which has a strong focus on using music as a window into social, cultural, and political history. To supplement lecture material, I like assigning monographs, biographies, autobiographies, or even novels that explore themes related to the course and that are intended to provoke discussion and debate. 

I've been trying to put my course readings together and have identified some texts I want to assign, but there's a gap in material where I don't really have much on pre-1940s music. So if you guys have any suggestions on books to assign that would cover early jazz history, please leave them here. To get a sense, these are the texts I have identified as potential readings for the course so far (I won't use all of these necessarily but it's the list I'm working with right now):

Leroi Jones -- Blues People

Scott DeVeaux -- The Birth of Bebop

Art Taylor -- Notes and Tones

John Szwed -- Space is the Place

Valerie Wilmer -- As Serious As Your Life

Steven Feld -- Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra

Carols Ann Muller -- Musical Echoes: South African Women Thinking in Jazz

I've also considered using the George Lewis book on the AACM, but am worried it's too long and dry. I've also thought about Linda Dahl's book on Jazz Women. Thanks in advance for any suggestions you have. 

[felser]

[BillF]

[sidewinder]

 Not this one..

[BillF]

12 hours ago, sidewinder said:

 Not this one..

Agreed! That set me on the wrong course for all of a year when I was 17 in 1957. Ellington stopped being a jazz musician when he hired saxophonists; anything without a banjo was no longer jazz, etc,etc. Fortunately, at 18 I heard Bird which swept all that away. Ah, the trials of youth! 

[sidewinder]

2 hours ago, BillF said:

Agreed! That set me on the wrong course for all of a year when I was 17 in 1957. Ellington stopped being a jazz musician when he hired saxophonists; anything without a banjo was no longer jazz, etc,etc. Fortunately, at 18 I heard Bird which swept all that away. Ah, the trials of youth! 

I have a theory that there was a diabolical plot which had every secondary school and college in the U.K. given a gratis copy of this back in the 1950s to put the youngsters off the trail with total misinformation. Not knowing any better or having any other sources at hand in my school library it formed the basis of the literature to support a summer project of my own choosing (on guess what). Ended up with grand statements like the ODJB invented jazz and that jazz itself ended back in 1939..

Edited October 7, 2016 by sidewinder

[mikeweil]

Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune - to me the best there is. 

[BillF]

2 hours ago, sidewinder said:

I have a theory that there was a diabolical plot which had every secondary school and college in the U.K. given a gratis copy of this back in the 1950s to put the youngsters off the trail with total misinformation. Not knowing any better or having any other sources at hand in my school library it formed the basis of the literature to support a summer project of my own choosing (on guess what). Ended up with grand statements like the ODJB invented jazz and that jazz itself ended back in 1939..

Bruce Turner was very good on this in his autobiography, Hot Air, Cool Music. Noting that Hugues Panassié "had seen fit to magnify the importance of one small corner of the jazz scene, at the expense of everything else," he says:" Here in Britain, Rex Harris brought out a paperback Jazz which sold an alarming number of copies." 

[lipi]

"Jazz Masters of the 20's" by Richard Hadlock

The Gunther Schuller books "Early Jazz" and "The Swing Era" are good, but probably too in-depth for a broad survey course.

"Hear Me Talkin' to Ya" by Nat Hentoff is delightful and will keep students interested and likely amused.

[Big Beat Steve]

Ira Gitler: "Swing to Bop"

I find this book a LOT more fascinating than Scott DeVeaux' book on the same subject matter (mainly because - much as I like the Hawk - I find his book blows up Coleman Hawkins' importance to the development of bop WAAAAYY out of all proportion - as if Hawk was the beginning and core of ANY development of modern jazz)

As for THIS focus of yours ...
"which has a strong focus on using music as a window into social, cultural, and political history .."

have you tried these?

Lewis A. Erenberg, Swingin' The Dream - Big Band Jazz and and the rebirth of American culture

David W. Stowe - Swing Changes - Big Band Jazz in New Deal America

I have my troubles with both of these (and a few others in that vein) as the (scholarly) authors here and there make it plain obvious beforehand they have an agenda they are out to prove and arrange their "story" to prove their point. So the reading and understanding of these books might need to be taken with a dose of background knowledge. But STIll they make for interesting and instructive reads.

And at the other extreme (going beyond "Hear Me Talkin' To Ya"), how about getting your class to sift through fact and fiction in Mezzrow's Really The Blues or pinning down the essence of Condon's We Called It Music?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited October 7, 2016 by Big Beat Steve

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

One I like a lot, which provides a great deal of context is R J Smith's 'The great black way: LA in the 1940s and the lost African American renaissance'.

MG

[JSngry]

Let a man come in and do the popcorn.

[Face of the Bass]

4 hours ago, Big Beat Steve said:

Ira Gitler: "Swing to Bop"

I find this book a LOT more fascinating than Scott DeVeaux' book on the same subject matter (mainly because - much as I like the Hawk - I find his book blows up Coleman Hawkins' importance to the development of bop WAAAAYY out of all proportion - as if Hawk was the beginning and core of ANY development of modern jazz)

As for THIS focus of yours ...
"which has a strong focus on using music as a window into social, cultural, and political history .."

have you tried these?

Lewis A. Erenberg, Swingin' The Dream - Big Band Jazz and and the rebirth of American culture

David W. Stowe - Swing Changes - Big Band Jazz in New Deal America

I have my troubles with both of these (and a few others in that vein) as the (scholarly) authors here and there make it plain obvious beforehand they have an agenda they are out to prove and arrange their "story" to prove their point. So the reading and understanding of these books might need to be taken with a dose of background knowledge. But STIll they make for interesting and instructive reads.

And at the other extreme (going beyond "Hear Me Talkin' To Ya"), how about getting your class to sift through fact and fiction in Mezzrow's Really The Blues or pinning down the essence of Condon's We Called It Music?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks! Yeah, I'm not yet 100 percent on Birth of Bebop. I agree that the stuff on Hawkins is out of proportion but I like the way the book is written. So I'm not sure on that one yet. I am sure on Notes and Tones and Blues People, both books that I think will provoke a lot of discussion, and I'm almost certainly going to assign the Feld book on Jazz in Accra and the Muller book on Sathima Bea Benjamin, because I want the course to be transnational and I think both of those books do a good job of illustrating those connections. I'm also thinking about Robin D.G. Kelley's book Africa Speaks, America Answers, although I think the Feld book might cover some of those themes better than Kelley does. I haven't read Erenberg or Stowe, I will definitely be checking them out. 

[JSngry]

"Music is no good if you're evil."

There needs to be a pamphlet of this talk, transcribed and available in bulk.

[Larry Kart]

May I suggest:

https://www.amazon.com/Jazz-Search-Itself-Larry-Kart/dp/0300104200/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475886084&sr=1-1&keywords=larry+kart

I know the author, and he's a very nice guy.

Also, though it's pricey even used on Amazon, I'm pretty sure that it can be found elsewhere "remaindered" fairly cheaply.

Well, I've scouted around and it seems to be expensive everywhere. Hey -- I wrote a rare book!
 

[John L]

I second the recommendation of Jazz in Search of Itself. 

For a short and concise history that your students might use as general background, I think that Ted Gioia did quite a good job on his History of Jazz.   For my taste, it gives a considerably more accurate and balanced view than the long-winded Shipton volume. 

 

[Milestones]

I liked Gary Giddins' collections of articles, such as Visions of Jazz.

 

[A Lark Ascending]

On earlier jazz and aimed at the less experienced listener:

24 chapters covering the big names from the The ODJB to Roy Eldridge. Rather than generalising Lyttleton focuses on particular recordings, explaining why he thinks they are outstanding and how they fit into the development of jazz. Written in plain rather than technical language. Lyttleton was a player over many decades and an open-eared broadcaster about jazz (and other things) with that ability to write about jazz without pretension. 

I very much enjoyed the Alyn Shipton book mentioned earlier when I read it some years back. 

Edited October 8, 2016 by A Lark Ascending

[paul secor]

Hear Me Talkin' To Ya by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff has already been mentioned, but it's a good one to capture the spirit of jazz.

Sidney Bechet's Treat It Gentle is another book that can give people a sense of the feeling of the life that's in the music.

A.B. Spellman's Four Lives in the Bebop Businesss

Donald M. Marquis' In Search of Buddy Bolden and Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter capture the facts (as far as they can be known) and the myth of Buddy Bolden.

 

You might want to present some visuals that capture some of the spirit and life of the music:

Your students could find photographs and artwork online from sources such as:

Swing Era New York: The Jazz Photographs of Charles Peterson

Milt Hinton's photographs in Bass Line and Over Time

Roy DeCarava's photographs

David Hammons' artwork

J.J. Sempé's The Musicians

Lee Friedlander's The Jazz People of New Orleans

The collection Seeing Jazz, edited by Elizabeth Goldson

Sometimes visuals can give people as much of an entryway as words can.

 

Not to tell you what to do, but I found when I was starting to listen (and even after that) that I learned and experienced more by jumping around to different eras and listening to the music in that way rather than listening strictly historically. And I found that I had a better sense of the music by listening to musicians who were possibly not "the biggest" names (though who were very good musicians) mixed in with the major names - Bubber Miley or Buck Clayton, along with Louis and Miles. for example,

I hope that I don't come across as telling you what to do with your class. I don't mean to do that - just offering some ideas.

 

 

 

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

4 hours ago, paul secor said:

 

Not to tell you what to do, but I found when I was starting to listen (and even after that) that I learned and experienced more by jumping around to different eras and listening to the music in that way rather than listening strictly historically. And I found that I had a better sense of the music by listening to musicians who were possibly not "the biggest" names (though who were very good musicians) mixed in with the major names - Bubber Miley or Buck Clayton, along with Louis and Miles. for example,

 

I agree with that. Musicians who are often dismissed as 'generic' can tell the beginner MUCH more about the music and what it was for than geniuses who are VERY much individuals.

Not that one shouldn't listen to geniuses, but just remember they aren't the be all and end all of anything.

MG

[JSngry]

My experience has been that the music creates it's own sociology, agenda, etc. as it goes. So, as much as I appreciate the "academic" overviews, I do feel that they have a probably unavoidable tendency to fit the subject to the agenda. That's neat, clean, and most importantly, publishable. But my preference is to critically examine oral histories. As inconsistent and crazy as they can be in the aggregate, I think thattthat's where you get the reality of the experience, the truth if you will, because the truth of life is that it is inconsistent, crazy, often irreconcilable within itself.

Analog life, anyway. Digital life might well produce a whole other truth in those regards. But to study jazz history, I think you need to be ready to accept a. fully sloppy analog paradigm and all the dead ends, irregular shapes, and unbalanced equations that come with that. Accept them and revel in them.

[Big Beat Steve]

19 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

May I suggest:

https://www.amazon.com/Jazz-Search-Itself-Larry-Kart/dp/0300104200/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475886084&sr=1-1&keywords=larry+kart

I know the author, and he's a very nice guy.

Also, though it's pricey even used on Amazon, I'm pretty sure that it can be found elsewhere "remaindered" fairly cheaply.

Well, I've scouted around and it seems to be expensive everywhere. Hey -- I wrote a rare book!
 

My copy (Amazon too) wasn't that expensive. Did I hit a scoop?

 

But if I understood Face corectly he was asking specifically for recommendations about "early jazz" (which I loosely interpret as Pre-hard bop). This would be some 60-80 pages out of your 300-something, isn't it? Which does not invalidate your book one bit, or course, but may just explain why it was off the radar in previous recommendations.

Edited October 8, 2016 by Big Beat Steve

[BillF]

2 hours ago, Big Beat Steve said:

My copy (Amazon too) wasn't that expensive. Did I hit a scoop?

 

But if I understood Face corectly he was asking specifically for recommendations about "early jazz" (which I loosely interpret as Pre-hard bop). .

20 years earlier than that - he's asking for reading on "pre-1940s music" - which is exactly why I didn't mention all those fine books on bebop that I've read! 

[JSngry]

Exactly. And that's why I recommend a critical reading of oral histories of the musicians who were there. Get as many of the words as you can outside of however anybody else tried to frame them. Not that there's anything intrinsically insidious about framing, just that I think you do better when you start as close to the source as possible and then research out from there. Perhaps not at the level of fact, but as far as things like environment, culture, etc.

Over the long haul, oral histories tend to introduce variables, and variables are cool if for no other reason than they illuminate fuzziness as a natural condition, not a defect to be cured.

[Larry Kart]

7 hours ago, JSngry said:

Exactly. And that's why I recommend a critical reading of oral histories of the musicians who were there. Get as many of the words as you can outside of however anybody else tried to frame them. Not that there's anything intrinsically insidious about framing, just that I think you do better when you start as close to the source as possible and then research out from there. Perhaps not at the level of fact, but as far as things like environment, culture, etc.

Over the long haul, oral histories tend to introduce variables, and variables are cool if for no other reason than they illuminate fuzziness as a natural condition, not a defect to be cured.

Sorry -- I didn't understand. In that case, this one is close to a must, a remarkable, enlightening, and highly readable piece of scholarship:

https://www.amazon.com/Pioneers-Jazz-Story-Creole-Band/dp/0199732337/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475977837&sr=1-3&keywords=lawrence+Gushee