from a Financial Times review:
The sounds and the fury
By Mike Hobart
Published: July 28 2006 15:51 | Last updated: July 28 2006 15:51
BLOWIN’ HOT AND COOL: Jazz and Its Critics
by John Gennari
University of Chicago Press ?22.50 480 pages
This is a book about jazz in which the music is in the background, for John
Gennari’s main concern is a critique of jazz criticism from the 1930s to the
present. Densely researched, broadly unpartisan and compiled with a wry sense of
humour, Blowin’ Hot and Cold still manages to reveal much about jazz, and more
about the lives of its musicians, than any number of hagiographies.
Gennari concentrates on the writers that you might stumble across on album
sleeves and in the media, such as Marshall Stearns and Nat Hentoff. Their voices
make a raucously sectarian babble in which there isn’t even a consensus about
what jazz actually is. Along the way, the hidden agenda of the radical, liberal
and some not so liberal factions of the American intelligentsia are unpicked.
Yet far from mocking a Pythonesque bun-fight, Gennari shows enormous sympathy
towards this handful of university-educated, mostly white and nearly all male
critics, who wrested jazz writing from pulp fiction fantasy and fanzine
superficiality, to create a body of critical writing that became a template for
serious popular music journalism.
Gennari relates the schisms in jazz criticism to the broader rifts within
American academia. Here the ideas of Ezra Pound, F.R. Leavis, Theodor Adorno and
Herbert Marcuse are transported into the jazz arena,...
* Gosh...I wonder what Pound et al would have made of the jazz debates...
Sounds like a rewarding book.
Max R in Melb
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