We start in 1819 with slaves in Congo Square, New Orleans playing string and percussion instruments from their homelands. This music is Americanised (or American music was Africanised), meets with church music and French and Spanish influences, unique in the USA to New Orleans, and, by the time of the Civil War, becomes something that might be recognised as jazz.
We follow the journey to Chicago and thence to New York. By
this time there are early jazz recordings and writings to draw upon. Up to this
point, it’s a simple story and it appears as one where a new development comes
on the shoulders of previous activities. I suspect that a lot more was going on
outside of these three centres but the lack of a historical record makes it
impossible to cover every nook and cranny. He manages to follow most of the new
routes in jazz with the explosion of free jazz, fusion, socially conscious
music, chamber jazz, Latin jazz and so on. In later chapters he is still more
enthused by the music expanding and growing than he is with the Wynton Marsalis
led retrenchment of the 80s. He closes with a statement of faith in that he
believes that jazz musicians will continue to adapt and to incorporate whatever
the wider world throws at them.
Gioia tells his story through a
mixture of overviews showing how the music developed, the social and
technological impacts on it and short critical biographies of the main players
in any one era, the length of the entry dictated by their importance in the
development of jazz. Thus, most are a couple of pages long whilst Ellington and
Miles Davis are given several pages across several chapters. There is some
discussion about musical notation and techniques but not enough to lose the
non-musician like me.
Of course, one of the purposes of
a book like this is to either introduce you to new performers or to encourage you
to dig out recordings that haven’t been played for a while. Thus, I took a
break to listen to a couple of hours of Bud Powell, before returning to the
story, having already spent time in the company of Louis Armstrong and Art
Tatum.
It is a very US-centric view of
jazz, though this edition includes more information from around the rest of the
world in recent years. There is only a passing mention of the great jazz made
in the UK in the 60s and 70s, summarised into only a list of names, but more
recent developments that show modern artists mixing Afro-Caribbean influences
and hip-hop is covered in slightly more depth. There is also recognition of
European jazz as well.
I finished it a couple of days
before the recent Festival of Jazz and Improvised Music in Newcastle and came
away from that thinking that some of the musicians I heard (John Pope, Fergus McCreadie) are punching
holes in the tradition and taking the music to new places whilst many American
musicians are still bound to older ways. Maybe these next steps will turn up in
the next edition.
I heartily recommend this book and suggest you all write to Santa so he can bulk buy before he starts his round and drop a copy down the chimney to good jazz fans everywhere. Dave Sayer
The History of Jazz (3rd Edition) – Ted Gioia (Oxford University Press - ISBN: 9780190087210)
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