Jazz Books That I Have Read

Fernando Pestana da Costa


Below you can find my brief critical assessments of books about jazz that I read from cover to cover since the fall of 1998. Books of which I read just parts are not commented below.




A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album
by Ashley Kahn
Viking, New York, 2002

A Love Supreme is one of the most important and influential jazz albums of all times, and, certainly, one of Coltrane's most praised records. This book is a kind of biography of that record, presenting, in Chapters 3 and 4, the history of the recording sessions of December 1964 (with recollections of, among others, Elvin Jones) and also describing the surrounding context (musical and otherwise): the early play of Coltrane, including his work with Miles, the formation of his Quartet with Tyner, Garrison and Jones, and the contract with Impulse, and the aftershocks of the album release, describing the influences the album had in the avant-garde jazz scene at the time and in the larger world afterwards. This is a excellent book and a fit tribute to a unique jazz masterpiece.



Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times
by Robin D. G. Kelley
The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures
Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2012

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The Art of Jazz: A Visual History
by Alyn Shipton
Imagine, Watertown, 2020

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As Serious As Your Life: Black Music and the Free Jazz Revolution, 1957-1977
by Val Wilmer
Serpent's Tail Classics
Serpent's Tail, London, 2018

First published in 1977, this book by the British writer and photographer Valerie Sybil Wilmer is a classic about (as the subtitle states) the Free Jazz revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Divided into five parts, about diverse aspects of the free jazz scene, it provides a very good panoramic about it in its several dimensions: from fulls chapters about the life of some of its most important musicians (Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Ornette, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, and the AACM) to shorter references to others, less prominent but also very relevant ones, like the drummers studied in two chapters (Rashid Ali, Andrew Cyrille, Ed Blackwell, Elvin Jones, Sunny Murray,...), or jazzmen like Bill Dixon, Jimmy Lions, Frank Lowe, Marion Brown, and many, many others. Some other aspects, maybe surprising at first, like two chapters about the role of women in free jazz, both as supporters and companions of their jazzmen husbands, and as musicians themselves and what they had to battle against the resistance of male jazzmen. Other chapters, such as one about the politics of recording, are also very enlightening. An appendix with more than 160 biographical vignettes of jazzmen relevant to free jazz is also an extremely useful resource. In short: this is a very good, very readable book that everyone interested in jazz (in any style of jazz!) has to read and, after reading it once, they will almost surely return to it from time to time. A true classic!



Como Se Eu Tivesse Asas: As Memórias Perdidas
by Chet Baker
VS. Vasco Santos Editor, Lisboa, 2019

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DC Jazz: Stories of Jazz Music in Washington DC
edited by Maurice Jackson and Blair A. Ruble
Historical Society of Washington, D.C.; Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, 2018

This book left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand it is certainly a serious and very through scholarly work about jazz in the US capital city, but on the other hand Washington, DC, is, essentially, an American provincial town as far as autochthonous jazz is concerned (notwithstanding Duke Ellington, Billy Taylor, Shirley Horn, and a few others). What this means is that the book has some extremely interesting chapters, like the one about racial issues in Washington, DC, (in relation to music), or about Duke Ellington in Washington, or legislating jazz, and then has others of a rather more local significance which, by this reason, turn out to be rather dull to this non-washingtonian reader.



Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany
by Michael H. Kater
Oxford University Press, New York, 2003

Before I start reading this book I had the vague idea that Nazis didn't like jazz and they had acted accordingly. It thus came as a surprise to realize that truth was a lot less straightforward than I had antecipated. Being jazz in the twenties and thirties a music created largely by black americans and often associated with cabaret life and to the margins of respectful bourgeois society, it was understandably loathed by the Nazis before and after their ascent to power in January 1933. To compound the problem, Nazis disliked jazz also on ideological grounds: a sizable proportion of white jazzmen, in Germany and elsewhere, were jewish and it was rather natural for the Nazis to extend their antisemitic paranoia to the "degenerate jewish-nigger music." Having said this, a few extra surprising factors were at work to prevent the complete formal ban on jazz in the Third Reich: one was the very nature of the Nazi dictatorship itself: contrary to what has become the general misconception afterwards, the fascist regime of Germany was not a strictly top-down affair: much effort was spent by the top Nazi hierarchy to promote public consensus around their policies and avoid arousing unnecessary hostility among sizable fractions of the population. In the other hand, a relatively high latitude for iniciative was given to middle and low level party and state servents to "work towards the fuhrer." This very nature of the regime accounts for erractic policies in diverse areas of public life being followed at different times, places, and decision levels, not only in the period before the outbreak of the War but even later. Besides these features of the Nazi regime, some characteristics intrinsic to jazz helps explain its survival in Germany under such extremely adverse conditions: first of all, jazz by the thirties and forties have become a popular dance music (the swing style) and, even more relevant, has permeated a lot of other dance music styles that were not, strictly speaking, jazz, so that the boundary of what was and what was not jazz had become somewhat murky; secondly, the hard core fans and players, always a tiny minority, were willing to go on listening and playing jazz even when that could imply risking their own physical integrity, and even their lifes. All these general factors explain that the history of jazz in the Third Reich is a notoriously more interesting affair than one would have expected: the official repulsion for the "jewish-nigger music" went hand-in-hand with the also very official promotion of a "German jazz" style by the top leadership, notably by Goebbels himself. The prohibition of jazz in German radio stations went in parallel with the radio diffusion of jazz music in the Wehrmacht radio stations and with swing orchestras touring the troops in occupied countries, in the front lines, and even in German proper. This far from consistent attitude of the Nazi authorities didn't prevent the harassement and persecution of jazz fans and musicians by several repressive bodies (Hitler's Youth, Gestapo, SS) and some of them, most notably the Hamburg , ended up spending time, or even losing their lives, in concentration camps. This book is an excellent place to get to know these and other facets of jazz in the Third Reich: not only the general policies but also the lives of the musicians and fans and their struggle to keep jazz alive in spite of all the formidable adversities build up by an unbelivably paranoid dictatorship. To sum up: this is a must read book to everyone interested in jazz, the Nazi regime, or both.



The Ghetto Swinger: A Berlin Jazz-Legend Remembers
by Coco Schumann, with Max Christian Graeff and Michaela Haas
Doppelhouse Press,Los Angeles, 2016

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Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story Between the Great Wars
by William A. Shack
Music of the African Diaspora, vol. 4
University of California Press, Berkeley, 2001

William Shack, late professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, has done a terrific job in bringing to life the Parisian jazz scene between the Great Wars. At the end of the First World War black Americans in the US Expeditionary Force, most notably James Reese Europe's Hellfighters Band, essentially introduced jazz to France and, by staying in Paris or returning thereto after demobilization, they formed the condensing nucleus of the black American jazz community that flourished in Montmartre between the Wars. Contemporary to the Harlem Renaissance in New York, the "Harlem in Montmartre" community provided black jazz musicians, entertainers, and entrepeneurs, an exciting environment, largely free from the racial bigotry and Jim Crow policies common in the US. This book goes a long way to become the standard work on the matter, describing the principal individuals, the clubs, the shows, the music, all interwoven in a lively and fluent style that helps to revive these exciting and by now long gone decades. Wonderful!



The History of Jazz
by Ted Gioia
Oxford University Press, New York, 1998

This is the best short (circa 400 pages) history of jazz that I have read. Covering all major styles, schools, and players, it gives a rather complete perspective of the evolution of the music during its first century of existence. A very enjoyable book.



The House That TRANE Built; The Story of Impulse Records
by Ashley Kahn
Granta Books, London, 2006

As the title of this bok states, this is the history of one of the most charismatic record labels in jazz: the Impulse! Records. Easily recognizable on the shelves by the black and orange spines of its LPs (and later also CDs) this was an important label throughout the sixties, having in its catalogue a considerable amount of famous, nay: indispensible, jaz albuns by, among many others, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Oliver Nelson, and, of course, John Coltrane, who recorded his best work as leader for the label (naturaly A Love Supreme and Ascension, but also the magnificent sessions recorded live at The Village Vanguard in November 1961). The gems are just too many by too many people to list thel all here, but all jazz lover knows what I am talking about. Every fan of the music will enjoy the reading, a chronological history of the company under its different producers (Creed Taylor, Bob Thiele, Ed Michel, Steve Backer and Esmond Edwards) and their rapport with the musicians ant the jazz world. Interspersed among the main text are more than thirty vignetters about specific Impulse! albuns. Pity the current owners of the label did not take this opportunity to put back into the market the large number of titles currently unavailable.



How To Listen To Jazz
by Ted Gioia
Basic Books, New York, 2016

As the author himself states, "the path to appreciating jazz is thorough the ears". Rightly so! However, a gentle guide to what the ears are earing in not only important but it is really indispensable in order to really listen and to fully appreciate what is going on. This type of guide to the music is not really new, and a lot of books already exist that, with several degrees of competence, fulfill this desideratum. This is another one. But it is a very good one indeed, as one should expect from Ted Gioia. In about 250 pages, in a fluent style, Gioia guides us through the music: its structure, its components, its history, evolution, and innovators, down to the present day. But he finishes the book with an apparently paradoxical piece of advice: "Don't take my word for any of this. Go out and hear for yourself". I would rather write: "Listen to what Gioia tells you, but also go out and hear for yourself!" This book is an excellent place to start paying attention to what Gioia has to say, and to let him guide you through some of the greatest musical creations of the 20th century.



I Didn't Make a Million: How Jazz Came to China
by Whitey Smith, with C.L. McDermott
Earnshaw Books, Hong Kong, 2017

Whitey Smith, born Sven Eric Heinrich Schmidt in Denmark, arrived in the US as a young boy in 1906 and was a jazz drummer, boxer, and odd jobs' boy in Oakland, California, before migrating to Shanghai in 1922 with his band and become a leading part of the frenetic life of that most international of Chinese cities in the 1920s and 1930s. Leading his orchestras in important Shanghai venues and, later, also having his try in the nightclub business, he was one of the main characters responsible for introducing jazz to China and, as he states in this very entertaining autobiography, for putting China to dance, although nowadays it is not easy to listen to Whitey's music (a few bits can be found on the net though). He left China for the Philippines when Japan invaded Shanghai in 1937 and was in Manila when World War II started in Asia being incarcerated by the Japanese until the end of the war. He afterwards stayed in Manila for the rest of his life. The book, which was first published in the late 1950s, is a wonderful and vivid portrait of the Jazz Age in Shanghai, full of great short stories within the story, and written with a wonderful, understated humorous style. A must for all those interested in jazz history, and particularly for those wanting to read a first person testimony of the social and cultural settings underlying the spreading of jazz to the World in the early decades of the 20th Century.



Improvisando: A Nova Geração do Jazz Português
by Nuno Catarino and Mácia Lessa
Hot Clube de Portugal, [Lisboa,] 2019

The last two decades, since the beginning of the millennium, have been an extraordinarily productive era in Portugal for Jazz and Improvised Music. The appearance all over the country of music schools with jazz programmes, as well as a number of courses in some higher education institutions, and opportunities to play in a fairly large number of festivals, concerts, and clubs, led to the appearance of a community with large number of creative and technically very competent musicians, playing almost all styles of jazz (but with a clear predominance of post-bop and free). This book collects together interviews first published in the site/magazine Jazz.pt to fourteen members of the newest generation of Portuguese jazz and improvised music community. All the interviews, conducted by Nuno Catarino and illustrated with photographs by Mácia Lessa, are very interesting, allowing the reader to become a little more acquainted with the background and projects of these musicians, as well as with some aspects of their early live and why they become interested in jazz. Clearly, a lot more excellent young musicians could have been collected in the volume (or maybe they will be included in a second volume!...) but even so this is still a very useful reading for someone wanting to know a little better some of the main young Portuguese jazzmen active in the first decades of the 21st Century, such as Ricardo Toscano, Desidério Lázaro, João Barradas, Sara Serpa, Susana Santos Silva, among others. In the end, the book has a list with a selection of 75 CDs of what the authors consider to be some of the best Portuguese jazz music published between 2001 and 2019, both by the young lions and by established jazzmen. A very useful complement to an already excellent book.



Jazz em Cascais: Uma História de 80 Anos
by João Moreira dos Santos
Casa Sassetti, Cascais, 2009

The municipality of Cascais, a town some twenty kilometers west of Lisbon, is arguably the most important place in the history of jazz in Portugal after Lisbon. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, the construction of rail and street links to nearby Lisbon and the pleasant climate and landscape of the region were decisive in transforming the small fishing village into a tourist destination for the high social classes (the only ones that could afford to be tourists at those times...) and a place of summer residence for Lisbon's aristocracy and high bourgeoisie. With the 1920's and 1930's jazz arrived, intimately linked with the regions' Casinos: the one in Monte Estoril first, and the Casino Estoril from 1931 onwards, although some clubs also presented occasional jazz programs. The creation of the Luisiana Jazz Club in 1965 and, decidedly a lot more relevant, the start of the Cascais Jazz Festival at the end of 1971, definitely put Cascais's municipality in the history of jazz in Portugal. The continuous presence of jazz concerts with the very best international names in the music, in the Casino and in the Estoril Jazz summer festivals (and, at least in the current year of 2009, in a reenactement of the deceased Cascais Jazz Festival at the beginning of December), has contributed to the continued importance of the place in the portuguese music scene. This book, as its title implies, is a history of the eighty years of jazz presence in Cascais. An excellent place to learn about the history of the subject and the small stories around it. A beautifully produced book, with a plethora of historic and private photographs and photographic reproductions of press clips, club announcements, concert poster... This is an important contribution to the historic enquire that every portuguese music (and not only jazz) lover should read.



Le Jazz et les Gangsters 1880-1940
by Ronald Morris
Abbeville, Paris, 1997

An extraordinary book about the surprising connections between jazzmen and gangsters in pre-WW II United States, or why we all should be grateful to Al Capone and his friends!!



The Jazz Exiles: American Musicians Abroad
by Bill Moody
University of Nevada Press, Reno, 1993

Since its early years, Jazz and the musicians who made it traveled abroad to Europe and elsewhere. Starting with James Reese Europe's and Tim Brymm's military bands of the US expeditionary corps in 1918, the stream of musicians from America rapidly build up to a mighty river in the years following the end of WW I, pre-eminent among them where Jazz orchestras and musicians, who criss crossed the continent as far away as Russia. Of these touring jazzmen some would make Europe their home for more or less extended periods: these were the jazz exiles, the subject matter of this work. The bulk of the book is based on several interviews conducted by the author with a variety of jazzmen that at some point in their lives became jazz exiles: Bud Freeman, Jay Cameron, Art Farmer, Mark Murphy, Phil Woods, Joe Hendricks, Red Mitchell, and more. In a few other chapters the author tells the story of other famous, not interviewed, jazz exiles, such as Sidney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins, Lucky Thompson, Kenny Clarke, Stan Getz, and many others. The motives that led so many jazzmen to live in Europe for more or less extended periods were manifold: from the economical, laboral, and racical, to the downright political; not excluding the desire for pursuing a less stressful life. Although most of the interviews were conducted in the 1980s and early 1990s and refer to conditions that no longer apply, the book remains a valid testimony of a type of event that greatly contributed to the international spread of jazz.



Jazz Italian Style: From its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra
by Anna Harwell Celenza
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017

This is an extremely interesting book about Italians and jazz. Not just Jazz in Italy. In fact, the first chapter is titled "Italians and the origins of jazz" and deals with Italian-Americans (Italian immigrants or first generation Americans) and their role in the popular music in America in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and especially their relationship with early jazz: one hardly needs to be remembered that the first jazz record was released in 1917 (as I write: exactly one century and one month ago) by the Original Dixieland Jass Band, a quintet in which two of its members were Italian-Americans. The book then follows the spread of jazz in Italy as World War I draws to a close, the welcome reception jazz had from the Futurists and, in the 1920s and 1930s by the Fascists, up to the very top: Mussolini liked jazz, and, in his family, one of his sons one wrote critiques of jazz records for the press, and, of course, Romano Mussolini who, from the 1950s become a well known italian jazz pianist. The book is very enlightening in presenting the jazz landscape in Italy down to the end of the Second World War: radio stations and their programming, record companies, jazz in films, the politics (both domestic Italian and international), the fans, the critics, and, of course, the jazzmen: bandleaders like Cinico Angelini, Pippo Barzizza, and Gormi Kramer, singers like Alberto Rabagliati, Natalino Otto, or the Trio Lescano, as well as interactions with famous visitors from outside, such as Josefine Baker, Sam Wooding, Harry Fleming, and Louis Armstrong. In less than two hundred pages (plus notes) this remarkable book draws a brilliant picture of jazz and Italy until the end of World War II, and ends with a brief and intriguing reference to the influence of Natalino Otto in the young Sinatra, maybe the most famous Italian-Americans in the popular music business.



Jazz on the River
by William Howland Kenney
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005

The story of jazzmen traveling up the Mississippi river from New Orleans to Chicago, and thus spreading the new music in the early decades of the 20th Century has often been talked and written about. And just as often it has been criticized as a myth. This excellent work of scholarship shows just what is the truth in that tale and sets the record straight as to the importance of river boat jazz in the spread and development of the music. The Mississippi river system, including the Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri, in addition to the Mississippi proper, constitutes a huge transportation network crossing the United States north-south, and has New Orleans at its southern root. At the end of the 19th and early 20th Centuries it was no longer used to transport people and goods over long distances, having long been superseeded by the train. It was, however, in that era before air-conditioned, the place where the pleasure boat short day trip was developed by a number of private entrepreneurs, notable among then the Streckfus family. Those boats needed to entertain their guests, and for that they required dance music, jazz included. A number of early jazzmen established their name un the excursion boats based on St. Louis, Davenport, or Memphis. Most important among them was Fate Marable, whose bands included (at different occasions) Jimmy Blanton, Clark Terry, Earl Bostic, and, of course, Louis Armstrong. Marable, like so many of these early riverboat jazzmen, never recorded, so the sound of his several bands will remain forever unknown. The author of this book argues they must have sounded somewhere between the contemporary New Orleans sound and what would become the big band sound in the thirties. This work is the first book entirely dedicated to the exploration of this aspect of jazz history. It is well written, with chapters on the Streckfus family company, on Fate Marable and the Great Migration, on Louis Armstrong on the Mississippi (between 1919 and 1921), on the music scene in Memphis, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh, on Bix Beiderbecke and Jess Stacey, ending with the decline and fall of the excursion boat business in the years following the end of World War II, due to the invention of other forms of mass entertainment (such as TV) and of air conditioned, as well as changes implied by the onset of the civil rights movements. Here we have a wonderful and indispensable addition to our understanding of the history of Jazz in the 20th Century.



The Jazz Pilgrimage of Gerald Wilson
by Steven Loza
American Made Music Series
University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 2018

Gerald Wilson was a jazz trumpet player, arranger, composer, and big band leader of extraordinary longevity (he died in 2014, at 96, and directed and recorded his orchestra almost till the end). Some of his themes become famous, such as "Blues for Yna Yna", "Viva Tirado", or "Theme for Monterey", and the sound of his bands was unmistakable, even when playing other people compositions (like, to quote just some of my all time favorites, his versions of "So What", "Equinox", or "Milestones"). I must confess I am a big fan of his big band jazz sound, mixing bop, hard-bop, Latino, and classical influences, always with a very powerful swing and never far from the blues: to me, it is always a pleasure to listen to one of his CDs (of which I presently own more than a dozen). So, it was with some anticipation that I immediately bought this book about Gerald Wilson when I saw it at Foyles in April 2018. Unfortunately, the book is not at a pair with Wilson's music. It is build up from essential two types of discourse: one is extensive extracts from several interviews with Wilson, which were just transcribed to the printed word (leaving all the marks of orality that are OK in a radio or TV broadcast, but, to my mind, something of a put off in a book---at least in extended quotations, filling page after page); the other is extensive quotations from other authors, essentially from books and CD liner notes. So, tying these together makes for a rather strange reading experience, sometimes interesting from an informative point of view, which will be appreciated by every Wilson fan, but not exactly a book that is enjoyable to read. I would very much advice that one should approach this book after getting into Gerald Wilson's sound (and nowadays there is plenty of it for free in the internet.) Enjoy the music first and, if you feel like, read the book afterwards.



The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire
by Ted Gioia
Oxford University Press, New York, 2012

This is a wonderful reference book about (as the title tells us) the "Jazz Standards", or some of them anyway... Like any reference book, it is not intended to be read one page after another but to be browsed at leisure and consulted when needed. However, unlike the vast majority of reference books, this almost calls to be read as a "normal" book, and that was exactly what I did: between August 23, 2014, and May 1, 2015, I read each day a single "chapter" of this book (each "chapter" is a \(1\frac{1}{2}\) to \(2\frac{1}{2}\) pages long story of a particular standard) while listening to the recommended versions of each standard I happen to own in my CD collection. This way of degusting the book gave me, each day, and for 252 days, a joyous after dinner half an hour that sadly came to an end all too soon with the readding of the chapter on "You'd be so nice to come home to", accompanied by the great Lee Konitz version in the album Motion: enjoy!



Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece
by Ashley Kahn
Granta Books, London, 2000

Kind of Blue is probably the most important and influential jazz record ever made. Recorded in two sessions, in March and April 1959, by one of the most outstanding jazz combos of all times (Coltrane, Cannonball, Bill Evans, Chambers, and Cobb, under Miles leadership) it was recognized as a masterpiece shortly after its release. An hauntingly beautiful, mesmerizing, performance whose successive listenings are always rewarding, those forty five minutes of exquisite beauty have now a fitting literary companion in this book. With two first chapters on the early career of Miles, and two last ones on the selling of Kind of Blue, the central part of this work are the two chapters with the detailed account of the two recordings sessions, based on a number of interviews with some of those present, and on the audiction of the complete master tapes, including the studio chater, some of which is reproduced. A beautiful, well conceived book that, however, should only be read in tandem with the music. So What?!...



Lisboa e o Jazz: Uma Pequena História da Relação da Cidade Com o Jazz nos últimos 80 Anos
by António Rubio
Colecção Os Vicentes, vol. 2
Lisboa, 2008

This work is very short (24 pages long) booklet about the history of jazz in Lisbon and is written by one of the Portuguese "professional amateurs" jazz critics and writers. It would certainly be unfair to compare this 24 pages booklet with other histories of jazz in European cities, like the 550 pages of Pujol's Jazz en Barcelona (up to 1965 only!) or the 300+ pages of Torres' Jazz en Sevilla 1970-1995, or, in Portugal, the nice books by Moreira dos Santos' Jazz em Cascais or Jazz na Terceira, this last one co-authored by dos Santos and the author of the present booklet, on the history of Jazz in one of Azores islands. The present booklet is indeed not on a par with these books. It seems to be a transcription of radio talks by the author in Radio Europa Lisboa FM radio station, and still carries at points some orality marks. Notwithstanding these drawbacks, it is still a useful introductory and illustrated panorama of the relation of Lisbon with jazz from its beginnings. Useful while we wait for a proper book length history of the subject.



Live at The Village Vanguard
by Max Gordon
Da Capo, New York, 1980

The autobiography of the founder and owner of the legendary New York nightclub where so much historical jazz records have been, and continue to be, recorded. Actually, just the last third of the book deals with stories about jazzmen: the rest concentrates on other artists and performers that started at the Vanguard, some now famous, like Barbra Streisand and Woody Allen, others not so much, at least not for me... This is an interesting book with some funny stories but I would have liked some more jazz related ones, in particular I miss a chapter on Bill Evans...



O Livro de Jazz em Portugal: 90 Anos de Swing nas Letras, 1923-2013
by João Moreira dos Santos
Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisboa, 2013

This nice book (only published in electronic version) is the catalogue of a book exhibition about jazz and books published in Portugal, that took place in the National Library of Portugal, Lisbon, in 2013. Portugal is not exactly a country with a rich bibliography about jazz, with the first portuguese book about jazz music published only in 1960, when in all other european countries of any relevance this type of books started to appear in the 1920s. In spite of this, jazz also had an early impact in the printed word in Portugal, mainly through some fiction books of the 1920s and 1930s picturing Lisbon's bas-fonds, as well as in some essays about modern life, such as the book "A Idade do Jazz-Band", the very first jazz influenced book published in Portugal, whose cover was used for the cover of this catalogue. This catalogue covers the diverse aspects of the influence of jazz in the books published in Portugal (with the exception of poetry) from the decade after World War I until today. It is an informative book nicely illustrated with many reproductions of the covers of the books discussed. An extremely interesting contribution to the history of jazz in Portugal in its multifarious aspects.



Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970s
by Michael C. Heller
University of California Press, Oakland, 2017

A splendid book about New York jazz scene in the 1970s, where a conjunction of diverse factors (musical, economical, political, city planning) led to the use of former factory spaces in Lower Manhattan as residences/performing spaces (lofts) for artists and jazzmen. This book, with two parts, is a very illuminating work about this period of jazz history in New York. The first part is, as its name ("Histories") implies, a general history of the decade, whereas the second one ("Trajectories") is a more disjoint set of chapters about different aspects of the loft scene. They are more or less independent (it almost looks as if each one is an adaptation of a previously published academic paper). Apart from the chapter "Archive", interesting from an ethnographic viewpoint but somewhat boring for a more jazz oriented reader, the rest of the book is extremely interesting and I enjoyed very much reading the stories or extracts of interviews with well known (but unfortunately almost forgotten nowadays) jazzmen of the period, of whom I have some records, such as Sam Rivers, William Parker, or Cooper-Moore, and also a huge number of others that I barely knew, including Juma Sultan, the percussionist former owner of a loft whose archive was the main documentary foundation of this book.



Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris
by Jeffrey H. Jackson
Duke University Press, Durham, 2004

This book is about the spread of Jazz in France in the decades between the two World Wars. It is not, however, mainly about the musicians that were active spreading it, but about the reaction to the new music by the French: the public, the entrepreneurs, the musicians (including the budding French jazzmen community), the critics, the fans. It is a very interesting book that, together with others like Harlem in Montmartre or Some Hustling This, contributes to the construction of a general picture of how jazz spread to the world in the first decades of the 20th century. Recommended!



Marabi Nights: Jazz, `Race' and Society in Early Apartheid South Africa
by Christopher Ballantine
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, 2012

This very interesting book is an account of Black South African jazz from its beginning in the 1920s until the end of the 1950s. It is a fascinating history richly intertwined with political, social, and gender relations aspects that turns this book into a fascinating reading not only for jazz buffs. Given the obvious fact that the names of most (maybe even all) of the musicians referred to in this book are unknown to even moderately knowledgeable jazz connoisseurs outside South Africa (and maybe even in South Africa!), the fact that the book is accompanied by a CD with 25 tracks recorded from 1931 to 1948, with precious comments by the book's author, is a very big plus to an already excellent book. (The author also gives reference to six CDs of reissued music that are by artists, or related to topics, discussed in the book.) Spread through chapters on the beginnings of Vaudeville and Jazz in South Africa and their social roles in Black urban centers, on the connection with race, class, and gender, on the influence of the United States, and on the traumatic social shifts induced by the early apartheid legislation, in particular the disintegration of Black rural society and family through male migration and its reflection in the music of the 1950s, this work traces a enlightening panorama of the development of Black urban popular music in South Africa before the high mark of the apartheid system. I found it a fascinating reading!



Mas É Bonito
by Geoff Dyer
Quetzal, Lisboa, 2014

This is the Portuguese translation of But Beautiful, a book about jazz and jazzmen. Each of the seven chapters is an fictionalized story about a famous jazzmen (Lester Young, Monk, Bud Powell, Ben Webster, Mingus, Chet, and Art Pepper) and through the book run a series of intermezzos run a parallel story about Duke and his saxophonist and clarinetist Harry Carney. This is a very wonderful attention grabbing book about jazz that most jazz fans are bound to like. It closes with an essay on tradition, influence, and innovation, and with a short discography about each of the above mentioned jazzmen and also those mentioned on the final essay.



Message to Our Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago
by Paul Steinbeck
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2018

This is a great book about the history and music of the famous Chicago band. It starts with the pre-history of the band, namely the stories of Mitchell, Favors, Jarman, and Lester Bowie, while still before the beginning of the Art Ensemble, the AACM and the first times in Chicago, the first stay in France and later the inclusion of Moye to constitute what became the classic Art Ensemble of Chicago. The story proceeds with the progressive rise to US and world fame, as they record for Atlantic and ECM labels, till the final years of less stable personnel with the retirement (and then the re-entry) of Jarman, the dead of Bowie and of Favors, and the incorporation of new members. Interspersed with the chapters on the history of the AEC, there are three chapters of musical analysis: the albums A Jackson in Your House, Live at Mandel Hall, and Live from the Jazz Showcase are dissected in detail. It is extremely interesting (nay: indispensable) to read this chapters while listening to these records: it is absolutely illuminating! We discover things that a more casual listener will miss at his own loss. Overall, this is really a brilliant work, and if someone is not a big fan of the AEC before reading it (as was my case), it will most likely become one afterwards (as is also my case...)!



Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and "Inventor of Jazz"
by Allan Lomax
University of California Press, Berkeley, 2001

This book is a classic of jazz biography and oral history. It was first published in 1950, based on the recordings and interviews conducted in the end of the thirties by Allan Lomax for the Library of Congress, where he, together with his father John Lomax, created the Archive of American Folk Song and were responsible for innumerous and important interviews and recordings of American folk music, blues and early jazz, with a large number of its original practitioners that, in most cases, would have remained in total obscurity without their endevour. Jelly Roll Morton, born in 1890 in New Orleans, was the first great jazz composer, arranger, and band leader, and its first recorded great pianist, famous for his boastful claim of having "invented jazz in 1902". He was also a pool player, a gambler, and a pimp. Having achieved some notority in the twenties and early thirties with a wonderful series of recordings for RCA Victor with his Red Hot Peppers, he has gone down oblivion by the time Lomax interviewed him, and this book was largely responsible for his postumous recognition as one of the great early jazz creators. His colourful life and the lively first person speach of most of the chapters turned the reading of this book into a deligthful time. And to listen to his RCA Victor recordings and to his Library of Congress music recordings published by Rounder while reading the book was a very enjoyable experience indeed.



Monk! Thelonious, Pannonica, and the Friendship Behind a Musical Revolution
by Youssef Daoudi
First Second, New York, 2018

A very nice graphic novel about the live and music of the great Thelonious Monk and his friendship with baroness Kathleen Annie Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a rich heir of the British branch of the Rothschild family and an important patron of many prominent bebop musicians, Charlie Parker and Monk being the most well known. The book, that should be read while listening to Monk's records, is a very beautiful attempt to capture in drawings the angularity and dissonances in Monk's great compositions, including the famous one written in the baroness' honor: Pannonica.



Myself When I Am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus
by Gene Santoro
Oxford University Press, New York, 2000

Bass player and composer Charles Mingus is one of the gargantuan personalities in the jazz pantheon. Widely known in his lifetime for his violent outbursts, "jazz's angry man" was one of the most important jazz composers ever, responsible for an incredibly large number of recordings that became classics and milestones in the evolution of the music, like the albuns "New Tijuana Moods" (1957), "Blues and Roots" (1959), "Mingus Ah Um"(1959), "Mingus Dinasty" (1959), "Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus" (1960), and the masterpiece "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" (1963). His different groups, all known as the "jazz workshop", became legendary, and included, at one time or another, some of the most adventurous and creative jazz musicians, like Eric Dolphy, Jackie McLean, Booker Ervin, Mal Waldron, Jaki Byard, Jimmy Kneeper, and Dannie Richmond, among others. This book is a biography of Mingus that do him justice and is commensurate with his genius: it follows his life from the early years in Los Angeles, and the beginning of his professional life in the West Coast, to consecration in New York; his lifelong struggle against racism and discrimination, as well as his, at times violent and paranoid, behaviour towards his family, musicians and acquaintances. Not a black-and-white type of biography, this rich portrait of a complicated and troubled, but genial, personality is a must to everyone hooked up by his hauntingly beautiful music.



Ornette Coleman: The Territory and the Adventure
by Maria Golia
Reaktion Books, London, 2020

In this book we have a very nice biography of Ornette Coleman, one of the most important jazzmen in the second half of the twentieth century and one of the fathers of free jazz. The book is organized in four parts: a first part is about Ornette's live in Fort Worth, Texas, where he was born in 1930, and his early career moves. Part two deals with what could be classified as the central period of Ornette's career and the most important with respect to its impact in jazz: from the time he arrives in New York in 1959 to the end of the 1960s: the impact of his two records for the Contemporary label (still recorded in Los Angeles in 1958 and early 1959), then the famous album Shape of Jazz to Come, on Atlantic, with the great quartet with Cherry, Haden, and Higgins, the historic stint at the Five Spot, and then the string of Atlantic and Blue Note albums that followed in the years to come. The third and fourth parts, although they looked to me as a bit less chronologically constructed, deal with the later decades in Ornette's life, starting with his return to Fort Worth for the inaugural concert in the Caravan of Dreams Performing Arts Center, and continuing with his life, interests, the evolution of his musical and artistic interests, the gradual acceptance of his work and importance. The book is not only very nicely written but also very engagingly done: although Ornette is the main character, he is far from the only one: Golia describes at length the life of many other jazzmen that crossed paths with Ornette, as well as the historical situations and landscapes which shaped the life and work of all those musicians and, reciprocally, were also constructed by them. In short: this is a first class addition to the literature about Ornette and also about jazz, jazzmen, their art, and the world they live in.



Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1917-1980
by S. Frederick Starr
Oxford University Press, New York, 1983

It is a remarkable fact that the year of 1917 was unusually rich in events that left an indelible mark in our recent history. Of these, two are the subject matter of this book: Jazz, my favorite kind of music, was first put on record in a 78 rpm disc by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded in New York City in the 26th of February. Two weeks later, on the other side of the Atlantic, and at the far end of a war torn continent, an unorganized protest against bread shortages in Petrograd (St. Petersburgh) resulted in the overthrown of the Romanov dinasty in Russia and quickly grew into a fullblown Revolution resulting in what was arguably the most important and influential single event in the 20th Century: the Bolshevik coup, better known to history as the October Revolution. It is the history of the interrelation between Jazz music, its practicioners and fans, on one side, and the regime that came to power following October, on the other, that is the subject of this book. And what a fascinating and convoluted history it is! Due to World War I, the 1917 Revolutions, the Civil War and foreign intervention, jazz arrived in Russia rather late when compared with West european countries: from 1917 several American groups (both civilian and military) toured England, Belgium, France, but jazz did not reach Russia until 1922, and even then introduced by a russian jazz fan: the Futurist poet, Dadaist, dancer, editor, and temporary exile in Paris, Valentim Parnakh. The way jazz thrived under communist Russia was not independent of the general political climate affecting the arts and other intelectual activities, but was also dependent upon local patronage by party bosses that happened to be, or not, jazz fans. Also, along the years, one gets conflicting doctrines about jazz as a "decadent capitalist music" or as a music of America's "black proletarians". Both sides of the ideological debate could turn out to be rather pathetic: not only the staunch jazz bashers of the Association of Proletarian Musicians, and the intelectual emminence grise of the regime, Maxim Gorky, but also those defending jazz as a proletarian music, could engage in endless literary polemics about the music without really listening much to the real thing (certainly this was the case of the jazz apologist Marietta Shaginian that brilliantly expounded the proletarian origins of jazz, and defended the music, but was almost completely deaf...) So, the fine line separating (?!) authentic "proletarian jazz" from its "bourgeois corruption" became, not so strangely, the grey zone where fans and musicians could negociate the political limits of their art, and, considering the fact that jazz (swing) became a rather popular dance music by the 1930's and 1940's, it really allowed for a big expansion of the music during most of Stalin's era. The tragic part of the story is that in the increasingly autocratic regime following the NEP years, polemics about abstract concepts like music rarely kept at a literary level, and so, at some points, notably during the Great Purges of the late thirties, and at the very end of Stalin's life, after the end of the War, the general repressive climate in the USSR had consequences to jazz that were no different than those in the rest of Soviet society. What is really interesting is that, on occasions, and notably during the War years, a huge number of russian jazz orchestras were in existence, some semi-independent, others under the patronage of Federal, State, or Local governments, or the Armed Forces. Some of these orchestras were directed by first rate conductors and musicians that achieved notoriety in the Soviet Union and even abroad, like Alexander Tsfasman, Alexander Varlamov, Leonid Utesov, and the amazing case of the head of the State Jazz Orchestra of the Byelorussian Republic, the german-jewish exile Eddie Rosner (the "white Louis Armstrong"), one of the most sucessful jazzmen of the USSR. In the case of these four famous jazzmen, the paucity of commercial recordings currently available to jazz fans (at least outside Russia) is compensated by the existence of an excelent website containing a large amount of Real Audio files and other useful information. However, for an indepth analysis of Jazz in the Soviet Union in all its phases down to the end of the seventies, this book remains the main work available in english, and the author's lively style, at times funny, in other occasions bitter, always results in an enlightened narrative.



Red Jazz, ou la vie extraordinaire du camarade Rosner
by Natalie Sazonova
Parangon, Paris, 2004

I first heard about Eddy Rosner when reading Red and Hot, a history of jazz in the Soviety Union. I was fascinated by the man and his life, was able to listen to his music, first in a website dedicated to Soviet jazz of the 1930s and 1940s, and, later on, in an anthologic CD published by the russian Label VIP Records (VK CD 086-00). This book is a fictional autobiography of the ``white Louis Armstrong'' by the co-author of a renowed film about his life, The Jazzman From the Gulag. In less then one hundred and forty pages it describes the amazing life of this jazz musician, born Adolf Rosner in 1910, in Berlin, of jewish parents, and whose name changed to Jack, Ady, Eddy, Eddy Ignatievitch, or Pin'has ben Itz'hak, along his extraordinary life: from a member of the Weistaubs syncopathors in the late twenties in Berlin, until his death in the same city in 1976, having been, in between, one of the most celebrated jazzmen of the Soviet union, director of the State Jazz Orchestra of the Bielorussian Soviet republic, but also a prisioner in Magadan, in Siberia, following the governement backlash on jazz after the War (but where he was asked by the camp's director to form a jazz ensemble that traveled up and down the Kolyma camps to entertain guards and governement officials!). A very interesting book deserving to be read not only by jazz buffs.



Le Siècle du Jazz: Art, Cinéma, Musique et Photographie de Picasso à Basquiat
directed by Daniel Soutif
Musée du Quai Brainly / Skira Flammarion, Paris, 2009

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Sittin' in: Jazz Clubs From the 1940s and 1950s
by Jeff Gold
Harper Design, New York, 2020

This fascinating, beautiful book provides an enlightning complement to any history of jazz in the United States by showing, in a plethora of photographs of patrons of jazz clubs (and restaurants where jazz was played) in the 1940s and 1950s what was like listen to, and dance to the sound of, jazz orchestras and combos in those places jazz lovers know by name but were never able to visit, either because they have closed long before we were born, or we have no possibility of going to the US in a kind of jazz historical tour. I very much enjoyed looking at the photos and reading the short vignets about the history of the tens of clubs covered in the book (about half of them in New York). The five interviews with jazzmen Quincy Jones, Sonny Rollins, and Jason Moran, the jazz scholar Dan Morgenstern and the cultural critic Robin Givhan are all interesting, although the one I think is best (by a wide margin) is the one with Morgenstern. The two aspects that I thing could be better are: the existence of maps of the cities with the locations of the clubs (only New York has this, and not for all cases), and an index or list of the clubs covered in the book. But overall I found this is a magnificent complement to standard histories of jazz in these two central decades of the 20th Century.



Some Hustling This! Taking Jazz to the World, 1914-1929
by Mark Miller
The Mercury Press, Toronto, 2005

Written by a respected canadian jazz author and journalist, this fascinating book tells a history of the spread of jazz to the world in its initial phases, from the days of World War I through the Jazz Age, until the great crash of October 1929 that serves as a symbolic close to the tale. But this is no ordinary soft history of sloppy scholarship: Miller has done an incredibly detailed research about not only the large picture, but the actual fine details of who has done what, where, how and with whom. And the book's chapters take us from New York in 1914 back to the big apple in 1929. In between we travel from Winniped, Calgary or Vancouver, to London, to Paris (again and again), to Kristiana (present day Oslo) and Copenhagen, to Moscow, Shangai, Buenos Aires, Rome, and Berlin. This in the company of a huge array of american (and sometimes local) jazzmen and entertainers, some of them remembered in standard jazz histories (Jelly Roll Morton, Sam Wooding, James Reese Europe, Sidney Bechet, Dave Tough, Garvin Bushell), but many many more whose names have been lost even to the most knowledgeable of jazz fans: who, today, knows the name, not to speak of the sound, of , say, Ernest Coycault, Tom Swift, Bill Brooks, Rudy Jackson, Willie Smith, or even the drummer Louis Mitchell, whom the author uses as a frame to the narrative? (the book begins with his arrival in Britain in 1914 and, but for the Epilogue, ends with his departure from France fifteen years later. This is indeed a wonderful book that takes us to another era and to one of the most forgotten episodes in the history of jazz: the true dimension of its worldwide diffusion in those years justly named the Jazz Age, and, of course, those pioneer musicians and entertainers who where responsible for it. All this is done with a lively style and a rigorous and deeply informed scholarship. Great stuff!



Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon
by Maxine Gordon
University of California Press, Oakland, 2018

Written by his widow, this biography of the great tenor saxophonist is a delightful book. Covering Dexter's early life in California to his cross country life in the bands of Lionel Hampton, Louis Armstrong, Billy Eckstine; from his Dial and Savoy recordings, to the ''lost decade'' of 1950s; from his long residence in Denmark, from where he often criss-crossed Europe, to his return to the United States, and to his main role in Bertrand Tavernier film Round Midnight, this book is full of interesting stories that every fan of Dexter and of Jazz (like me) will undoubtedly cherish and enjoy reading while listening to the marvelous sounds he left on record.



Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights
by David Margolick
Running Press, Philadelphia, 2000

"Strange Fruit", a song written by Abel Meeropol (aka Lewis Allan), is a powerful song that was sang by Billie Holiday, starting in 1939, and become one of her signature songs. One of the very few songs with lynching as theme, it became a protest song avant la lettre, and this little book is a kind of biography of the song, its origins, its interpretations by Holiday, the reactions it arose. An excellent and extraordinary book, to be read after knowing by heart Billie's recorded version of "Strange Fruit" for the Commodore label, and its powerful and almost unbearable lyrics: Southern trees bear a strange fruit,/ Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,/ Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,/ Strange fruit hanging from poplar trees./ Pastoral scene of the gallant South,/ The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,/ Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,/ And the sudden smell of burning flesh,/ Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,/ For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,/ For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,/ Here is a strange and bitter crop.



Swingin' the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture
by Lewis Erenberg
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998

Swing was the only truly popular jazz style: "starting" in 1935, in the now legendary Benny Goodman digression, the swing style lasted for about a decade and during that time it was the American pop music style, its bandleaders and musicians enjoying a public recognition and popularity in most cases higher than movie stars, and only comparable to what would happen with rock artists some decades after. This brilliant book traces the history of swing in its political, social, and cultural aspects, analysing what it represented for youths in the America of the Great Depression. In its radical cut with the "sweet music" bands of the early 1930's, swing was adopted by young radicals as the expression of a more democratic and unprejudiced way of life. It embodied a move (although modest by present day standards) towards racial integration and equality that was several decades ahead of the same type of movement in society at large, and most of its more important personalities lend their support to New Deal and progressive politics, left wing causes, and the Popular Front movement. All this, and more, are described and discussed in a masterly way in this book. Besides, it also puts meat into the backbones by discussing at length concret cases, such as Benny Goodman, the Duke, Basie, and Gleen Miller. The change in swing brought about by the War, as well as the wars within Jazz in the second half of the 1940's between traditionalists, swing, and bebop fans, culminating in the abrupt end of the swing era and of the classical big band jazz scene is brilliantly analysed in the last chapters of the book. A truly admirable and engaging work.



This is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture
by Iain Anderson
The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America Series
University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2007

An extremely interesting book about the rise of free jazz, its relations with the jazz canon, its not always comfortable relations with the european avant-garde music on the one and the emergent black nationalist movement on the other, the difficult acceptance of free jazz and in particular its most radical forms of free improvisation by the music establishment and by the general public, and the shift that this phenomena entailed, namely the increasing reliance on private and public sponsers, as well as the self image of the jazz musician as an avant-garde performer whose music production, like that of avant-garde classical musicians, becomes largely indiferent to its acceptance by the general public. Along the book, the work of seminal jazzmen of the era, like Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, the musicians of the AACM, and many others, as well as their reception by critics, entrepreneurs, and the general public, is presented. Overall this book is a compulsory reading to everyone interested in modern jazz, particularly in the free jazz movement and the important period from the 1950s to the 1970s.



West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945-1960
by Ted Gioia
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998

An extremely interesting book about Jazz on the West Coast: focusing not only on the famous (or infamous...) West Coast Sound, but dealing with the large variety of modern jazz produced in California in the 40s and 50s, from the very famous Charlie Parker, Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck or Ornette Coleman, to the almost unknown names of Dupree Bolton or Jack Montrose. I particularly enjoyed reading the chapter on Jimmy Giuffre while listening to the CDs in the Mosaic box of Jimmy's Capitol and Atlantic recordings. Chapter fourteen definitely wetted my appetite for the boxed set of Art Pepper's Galaxy recordings. The last chapter, on the influence of behind the scenes persons on what type of music is produced and listened to, has a very interesting argument that would require a whole new book to elaborate in detail; a book that I will be eager to read, if someone is able to write it!... All in all: this one is a terrific book indeed.



What Jazz Is: An Insider's Guide to Understanding and Listening to Jazz
by Jonny King
Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1998

A very nice and short guide about how and what to listening to in jazz. In an easy non technical language the author guides us to the several elements that we need to pay attention to when listening to a jazz record or performance: the basics of melody and rhythm (and the elusive swing), the call-and-response, the several important instruments and how they connect with each other (the piano-bass-drums rhythm section, as well as the front-line voices of trumpet, saxes, vibes, etc.) In the third and last part of the book, the author analysis ten pieces, all taken from the Blue Note catalogue, in which the diverse elements that have been previously discussed can be listened in action (so to speak). All of these ten pieces are in the hard-bop language, with the possible exception of Ornette Coleman's Round Trip and Wayne Shorter's Miyako, and this is my only complaint about the book: a few additional pieces in different jazz idioms would have much enriched the book. Notwithstanding, this is a very nice book deserving a full attentive reading and many short visits from time to time.



Why Jazz? A Concise Guide
by Kevin Whitehead
Oxford University Press, New York, 2011

A short but very informative guide about jazz, its history, styles, and main creators. Even if very brief, this book manages to include a fair number of short appreciations of specific tunes, with a careful description of what is going on, written in a way that anyone can follow while listening to them, a feature that is quite valuable both for the novice and for the more experienced listener.


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Last Update: June 5, 2021.