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Jazz history - all of it! The Thread

Whilst Danny is on holiday, some chronology on the period Danny has covered to date (including a brief bit on ragtime and a brief spillover into New York and the swing scene that Danny will presumably pick up on his return) mostly from the All Music Guide with some additional pieces on phonograph/radio/cinema/TV milestones. Feel free to add more:

1877 Phonograph invented

1888 Columbia Records founded. Edison Records founded.

1889 First disc records sold.

1892 Tom Turpin composes the earliest known rag ("Harlem Rag") - not published until 1897

1895 Buddy Bolden forms his first band. Scott Joplin's first two songs are published. Biograph Company formed, the first US company devoted to film production and expedition

1897 William Krell's "Mississippi Rag" is the first rag to appear in print

1899 Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" is published and becomes ragtime's biggest seller, launching ragtime craze

1901 Victor Talking Machine Company (later RCA Victor) founded

1902 Jelly Roll Morton starts playing piano in Storyville (aged 12). Later claims, he invented jazz then. Scott Joplin writes "The Entertainer", "The Ragtime Dance" and "Elite Syncopations".

1904 St Louis World's Fair holds ragtime contest

1906 Buddy Bolden committed to an institution. Freddie Keppard stars with the Olympia Orchestra. First experimental radio broadcast. First feature film released.

1908 Bassist Bill Johnson travels to LA, introducing New Orleans jazz to the West Coast

1911 Scott Joplin completes his ragtime opera "Treemonisha". Irving Berlin has better luck with his pop hit "Alexander's Ragtime Band".

1914 Freddie Keppard leaves New Orleans to join the Original Creole Band. Joplin writes his last two rags. Start of the Great War.

1917 Scott Joplin dies and the classic ragtime era is officially over. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band make first jazz recordings. New Orleans jazz style sweeps New York by storm with the arrival of ODJB at Reisenweber's Cafe. Jelly Roll Morton settles in LA. Storyville in New Orleans closes. US declares war on Germany.

1918 King Oliver moves to Chicago. Okeh Records founded. End of fighting in World War I.

1919 Sidney Bechet travels overseas with Will Marion Cook's Orchestra, introducing jazz to Europe. ODBJ visits England. National Prohibition Act passed. Frank Conrad resumes his amateur radio broadcasts including music.

1920 Mamie Smith records the first blues record. World's first commercial radio station, KDKA, created. First experimental radio broadcasts in Britain. Prohibition Act comes into force.

1921 Zez Confrey records "Kitten on the Keys", the most famous composition from the brief novelty ragtime period. US feature film production hits its peak (682 releases)

1922 Kid Ory's band records two titles in LA. New Orleans River Kings make their first recordings. King Oliver forms Creole Jazz Band. BBC is formed and has first transmission.

1923 King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Johnny Dodds, Bessie Smith, Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong make their debuts on record. King Oliver's Creole Band (with Louis Armstrong and Johnny Dodds) is the band of the year, playing nightly in Chicago. Don Redman becomes a regular member of the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. Duke Ellington visits New York for the initial time with little success. Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra makes debut on records. First sound short films.

1924 Louis Armstrong stars with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, shows New York musicians how to swing at the Roseland Ballroom. Muggsy Spanier makes recording debut. Fate Marable records her only session. Bix Beiderbecke records with the Wolverines. Paul Whiteman seeks to "make a lady out of jazz" and presents a watered-down version at Aeolian Hall.

1925 Armstrong starts series of Hot Five recordings including Cornet Chop Suey. First commercial electronic recording of a phonograph record. John Logie Baird transmits the first television picture

1926 Jelly Roll Morton records with his Red Hot Peppers in Chicago. Freddie Keppard cuts his best recording. King Oliver records with his Dixie Syncopators. Columbia Records acquires Okeh records. NBC formed and begins radio broadcasts

1927 Red Allen joins King Oliver's band. Armstrong records with his Hot Sevens. Duke Ellington wins regular gig at the Cotton Club, New York. Bix Beiderbecke splits the year between the orchestras of Jean Goldkette and Paul Whiteman. Don Redman becomes leader of McKinney's Cotton Pickers. Precursor to CBS begins radio broadcasts. The Jazz Singer becomes the first feature length motion picture with synchronised dialogue. Philo Farnsworth makes the world's first working television system

1928 Armstrong teams up with Earl Hines. Earl Hines first plays with his big band at the Grand Terrace in Chicago. Jimmy Noone records with his Apex Club Orchestra. Johnny Hodges joins Duke Ellington's Orchestra. First TV stations formed

1929 Armstrong begins recording exclusively with big bands. Luis Russel band makes finest recordings. Red Allen leads first record dates. Count Basie joins Bennie Moten's Orchestra. Cootie Williams replaces Bubber Miley with Duke Ellington. Jabbo Smith records with his Rhythm Aces. Casa Loma Orchestra makes its first recordings. Wall Street Crash. New Orleans jazz goes underground as Depression hits.

1930 Paul Whiteman's Orchestra films "The King of Jazz". Cab Calloway takes over the Missourians and begins playing at the Cotton Club.
 
Here is episode 1 of Ken Burns' Jazz miniseries which covers Sidney Bechet, Buddy Bolden, Freddie Keppard, Jelly Roll Morton and Nick LaRocca up to 1917.



This version is slightly longer:

 
A bit about the jazz age from an article in Variety's 50th anniversary in 1955 about the history of music over 50 years:

Variety 1955 said:
Developing Jazz Age Preshadows 1920s Era

Even with World War I still on, the Jazz Age was in the making. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band headed by NJ (Nick) LaRocca, was beginning to be heard. Their creations, "Tiger Rag", "Livery Stables Blues", their versions of "St Louis Blues" were forerunners of Paul Whiteman's suave jazz. "Pops" called it symphonic syncopation, even when he delivered "Wang Wang Blues" and the like. It was not until 1924 that Whiteman made a lady out of jazz with his now historic concert at New York's Aeolian Hall when he introduced George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue".

But the pre-World War I years resulted in a more hectic brand of jazz, originally spelled jass and later jaz. It was cradled in New Orleans' Basin Street, which birthed King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, and Memphis' Beale Street, and was developed in Chicago. The barrelhouse motif had its echoes in New York, although, coincidently, the svelter syncopated strains of Art Hickman were being heard from San Francisco, soon followed by another Coastite, Paul Whiteman, who capitalised on Hickman's pioneering.

Amidst the Dixieland Jazz Band's brand of "Tiger Rag" and kindred syncopation, the Broadway cabarets - the nite club billing is a post-Prohibition evolution - were purveying an alchemy of jazz with Hawaiian and shimmy dancing. Bee Palmer and Gilda Gray were the shimmy exponents. Bert Williams, the great Negro comic, was regaling "Ziegfeld Follies" audiences with his plea "I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate". Sophie Tucker, Earl Fuller, Ted Lewis, Dick Himber and Ban-Joe Wallace were jazz exponents of the Reisenweber's genre. Doraldina brought another brand of hip-swinging to the Main Stem in the guise of hula.

While the shimmy (Spencer Williams' "Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble" and "The Bombo-Shay" by Henry Creamer, Henry Lewis and Turner Layton) and jazz were in the making, wartime overtones were still being heard, albeit in a lighter vein.
Click to expand...
 
OK. Next instalment.


Mezz Mezzrow
(Clarinet, saxophone, Chicago scene character, and Viper King).

mezz.jpg



Born in 1899, Milton Mesirow was a larger than life character, stories of whose colourful exploits have overshadowed his playing. He’s already been heard in the thread, I think, on some of the recordings by the Austin High Gang.

Extravagant character
He was a good, though not great, player, but he deserves place in jazz history because of the extravagant way in which he personifies the times. There are two characteristics that are closely linked to jazz musicians in the 20s, and one is smoking marijuana, known by the black New Orleans musicians as “muggles”. Not all did use it – Kid Ory, for example, didn’t – but many did. Louis Armstrong was a life-long advocate of its virtues.

In the 1920s, marijuana was still legal in most US states (though alcohol wasn’t), and Mezzrow remembered he and Armstrong would roll their reefers “right out in the open and light up like you would on a Camel or a Chesterfield”.

Muggles King
Mezzrow became an ardent devotee of the drug, and earned the nicknames the Viper King and the Muggles King. He soon had a sideline in supplying marijuana to musicians, and became so identified with the drug that his name became slang for it: for many jazz musicians “mezz” overtook “muggles” as their preferred term for marijuana.

The second characteristic of the times was how this generation of white Chicago musicians related to African American culture. Remember that although Jim Crow laws are most identified with the South, the North was not immune to them. The Chicago venue licensing authorities and the local musicians’ union shamefully colluded in forbidding black and white musicians to play together. The Chicago Federation of Musicians was itself segregated; black and white musicians had to join different organisations. (See this account of the Seattle AMF.) Nor was the North immune to the general racism we tend to associate with the South.

We have already seen that the musicians themselves got round this by not being paid if they sat in with musicians of different races, by taking part in after hours jam sessions, and by meeting at each others’ houses. (Johnny Dodds’ home was particularly renowned as a party house for musicians of all backgrounds). For this generation of young white Chicago musicians, the older black players were first their heroes, and then their friends. Part of the deal became that if you were a jazz musician, you were anti-racist. It is one of the attributes that sections of civil society, particularly the press, began to hold against white jazz musicians, seeing it as evidence that they were of low morals.

Being black
Mezz Mezzrow went a step further. He began to insist he was actually black. In 1930, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was set up, and marijuana was eventually made illegal. Mezz was inevitably eventually arrested for possession with intent to distribute. Sentenced to a term in prison, he insisted – the prison being segregated - that he should be sent to a black wing, claiming he was a light skinned Negro of mixed race background.

The Mob
Mezzrow early on got a name for himself as someone who wasn’t afraid of the gangsters that ran the Chicago nightclub scene. Earl Hines remembered a run in Mezz had with Al Capone:

“It seems Al’s youngest brother, Mitzi, went for one of the good-looking entertainers with Mezz’s outfit, and Scarface ordered her fired. Mezz argued back while half a dozen ofAl’s henchmen stood around laughing at the nerve of this musician arguing with Mr. Six-Shooter.Finally Al started laughing too and said, ‘The kid’s got plenty of guts’”.(pp130/131, Shapiro and Hentoff).

You can hear Mezz’s playing as a sideman on a number of Chicago scene recordings, as well as with Bechet and with Fats Waller. But here is one of his own sides as a leader. It’s actually from the 30s, but I think we can let him off with that, after all he argued the toss with Scarface. Would you want to disagree?


COUNT%20BASIE,%20MEZZ%20MEZZROW%20AND%20EARL%20HINES%20IN%20PARIS.jpg




Morton and Cook don’t recommend any CDs of Mezz as a front man (although he does feature on CDs by Fats Waller). But his book of memoires, Really the Blues, published in 1946, became something of a cult classic. I haven’t read it, though I have long meant to get a hold of a copy.

 
Just like to say I've been enjoying this thread - I've bought the 'Hear me Talking to Ya' book after it was mentioned on here (not started reading it yet) and also, inspired by the thread, bought a DVD A Great Day in Harlem a documentary about the 1958 Art Kane photograph taken of 57 jazz musicians assembled in a street in Harlem. Lots of interesting interviews.
 
Thanks!!
There are two discs with the DVD so I'm ok about having bought it.
The second one has additional interviews etc.

I actually don't have a computer at home so I can only watch YouTube on my phone and without WiFi the picture quality isn't too good!
 
Just a couple of thoughts about Mezz claiming to be black. (His term was a "voluntary Negro"). It might seem odd from today's perspective, but it does seem to have been sincere. These guys were feeling their own way, and making up their own rules. And remember that as stances of solidarity go, insisting on being treated as black in a racist penal system is no idle "black-folks-love-me" boast.

When he and his wife, Mae (almost inevitably, an African American herself), moved to New York, they lived in Harlem.
 
Talking of Harlem, we will shortly be travelling there for the Harlem Renaissance. It has just come to my attention that Taschen have published a book called Jazz. New York in the Roaring Twenties.

cover_va_nippoldt_jazz_gb_1303211448_id_629274.jpg



At £ 34.99, the hardback is a bit rich for me atm. But if anyone is planning on getting it, I'd like to hear comments. It gets a good review in the current Jazzwise Magazine.
 
jusr read hear me talkin and let it to me dad whois a big jazz buff. also reading alvin shiptons history of jazz which is very good on all areas, esp. be-bop, hard-bop and cool
 
malatesta32 said:
jusr read hear me talkin and let it to me dad whois a big jazz buff. also reading alvin shiptons history of jazz which is very good on all areas, esp. be-bop, hard-bop and cool
Click to expand...
Alyn Shipton, A New History of Jazz? Yes, it's especially good on the 60s, and the politics of jazz of that era.
 
danny la rouge said:
Part of the deal became that if you were a jazz musician, you were anti-racist. It is one of the attributes that sections of civil society, particularly the press, began to hold against white jazz musicians, seeing it as evidence that they were of low morals.
Click to expand...

hence the 'digging' of jazz becomes a mode of resistance in nazi germany and occupied france. hitler hated it.
 
Hartzell “Tiny” Parham
(Pianist, organist, band leader, Chicago)




Born in Canada in 1900, but raised in Kansas, Tiny Parham worked the “Territory Circuit”, but found his way to Chicago by 1925, where he first worked as a pianist and composer for hire, accompanying blues singers and soloists. Here he is with Johnny Dodds, playing one of Parham’s own tunes.



Unusual arrangements
He was a terrific accompanist, but as a band leader he produced some very unusual and quirky music, combining instruments in ways other jazz composers weren’t. Tuba and violin, anyone? Here’s his Voodoo:



Some commentators find similarities with Ellington’s work at the time, but I think there’s a closer affinity with Jelly Roll Morton, perhaps best heard in this side, although Tiny’s own piano break is quite unlike Morton’s style:


So, an affinity. But it’s by no means a Jelly Roll rip off.

Jazz connections
It’s easy to forget, as we concentrate on the Chicago scene, that jazz was not sitting still in isolation in the city, but was evolving elsewhere as well. Sometimes it is said that it was evolving independently in the other locations it had been seeded, but that’s not quite true either. Tunes and reputations were being disseminated by the Territory Circuit, but also by recordings.

Records
Record distribution in the US was remarkable in the 20s, and people even in difficult to reach communities had access to recorded music. So the urban centres were much more into the jazz craze. When Louis Armstrong went on tour, he was amazed to hear his records being played in black neighbourhoods all over the country, “We were popular all through the Towns we passed through – Toledo Ohio – Cleveland – Detroit – Buffalo”. (Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words: Selected Writings). He was surprised to find he was already well-known in towns he’d never before visited.

Radio

dscf0002.jpg

A 1924 Operadio set

It was also jazz’s good fortune to take off just at the same time as radio broadcasting erupted. Beginning in 1920, the US soon had national broadcasting networks, disseminating music, light entertainment and news. By 1922, there were 30 stations in America, growing to 550 stations in 1923, by which year the popularity of radio had begun to hit sales of record players so much that record player manufacturers began to combine their machines with radio sets, though most of the approximately 3 million Americans homes by then owning radios still used crystal sets with earphones.

220px-Crystal_radio_advertisement.png

A family using a crystal set, 1922

So even if he had never heard Ellington’s band in person, Parham – and the other Chicago musicians – had certainly heard his records or broadcasts, just as the New York musicians had heard theirs.

The Mob
The Chicago music scene – like local government and law enforcement – was run by the Mob. Even venues not directly owned by gangsters such as Al Capone could not operate without their say. Parham worked in a club directly owned by Capone, in the Cicero area of the city.

Parham may have worked directly for Capone, but others couldn’t avoid indirectly working for the mob. Joe Glaser, who on paper owned the Sunset club, was described as “gangster connected”; in reality his club was controlled by Capone’s syndicate. Armstrong and Oliver worked at the Sunset, and Glaser was eventually to become Armstrong’s manager.

Turf wars
As the 20s progressed, turf war between the gangs became more and more heated, and musicians were getting caught in the crossfire. Often literally.

George Wettling, the drumming friend of Muggsy Spanier, remembered the intimidation and the guns of those times. “We would see those rods come up – and duck. At the Triangle Club, the boss was shot in the stomach one night, but we kept working”. (Shapiro and Hentoff).

Jimmy McPartland recalled the North Side mob coming into the Friar’s Inn, which had Capone connections. “So it was late this night, and we were off the bandstand and sitting in the back, when all of a sudden – bang, boom, bang! Somebody was shooting a gun.

Mike Fritzl was the boss there, and Mike says, ‘Play, play, fellers.’ We weren’t all that keen, but the shooting had ceased so we got up on the stand to play, and there was the bass fiddle all shot to pieces”.

Death
Like many others, Tiny got out of Chicago at the end of the 20s. He toured throughout the 30s, and died in a dressing room in Milwaukee during a show in 1943.

Tiny on CD
Morton and Cook recommend the Classics issue, Tiny Parham and his Musicians, 1926 – 1929.

images
 
Jabbo Smith
(Trumpet).


jabbo.jpg

Cladys “Jabbo” Smith was born in 1908 in Georgia, and learned to play trumpet while in an orphanage – a first parallel with Louis Armstrong. From the mid 20s he made some highly regarded recordings in New York. He was invited to join the Duke Ellington band, but although he is featured on the recording of Black and Tan Fantasy, he turned down a permanent spot in the band.

Armstrong’s replacement
Jabbo pitched up in Chicago in the late 20s, playing at a speakeasy called the Bookstore, just as Louis Armstrong was preparing to leave the city. Milt Hinton – Tiny Parham’s bass player, who later worked with Cab Calloway and others - remembered that Armstrong’s club, presumably the Sunset Cafe, was looking for a replacement trumpet player when Hinton went there to play bass: “They were looking for a trumpet player to take Louis’ place and they got Jabbo Smith. Jabbo was as good as Louis then. He was the Dizzy Gillespie of that era. He played rapid-fire passages while Louis was melodic and beautiful. [...] He could play soft and he could play fast but he never made it”. (Shapiro and Hentoff, pp135-136).

Armstrong’s biographer, Terry Teachout, describes Smith as “in some ways even more facile” than Armstrong (Pops, p144), but believes that he lacks Louis’ expressive ability in the higher register.

Here’s Jabbo with his Rhythm Aces, recorded by Brunswick in Chicago in 1929. Note the anachronistic tuba.

Ace of Rhythm


You can hear Jabbo’s debt to Armstrong in this 8 bar blues, including in the vocals:

Take Me to the River.



Foreshadowing the future of jazz trumpet

For Ted Goia’s money, though, Jabbo Smith’s “driving, energetic attack foreshadows the later evolution of jazz trumpet, as represented by Eldridge and Gillespie, more clearly than even Armstrong’s”. (Gioia, p67).

Certainly, Eldridge was known to have valued some of Jabbo’s records highly, and Smith’s playing is adventurous and exciting, perhaps more so when he reaches for ideas you’re not quite sure he’s going to be able to pull off.

Listen out here for the wonderful Ikey Robinson on banjo.

Michigander Blues


Brief flowering

Ironically Jabbo bloomed on the Chicago music scene, just as the scene there was itself fading. The Mob gangs were engaged in an increasingly destructive turf war over control of the clubs, and civil society and the public authorities were clamping down on the clubs due to disapproval of the racial integration being flaunted by musicians, and in many cases by club audiences.

Louis Armstrong was obliged to leave Chicago on a tour of the country after he became embroiled in a feud between competing management claims over him, during which a “big, bad-ass hood” named Frankie Foster pulled revolver on Louis and forced him to make a phone call withdrawing from a series of engagements in Chicago and agreeing to begin another contract in New York. On seeing the gun, Armstrong is said to have replied: “Weeeellll, maybe I do open in New York tomorrow”. Once he was away from the hood, he decided that giving both cities a wide berth for a while would be sensible. (See Teachout, pp162-164).

As the war escalated, venues were subject to firearms attacks and fire-bombings; the Plantation was firebombed while King Oliver’s band was on the bandstand. (Shipton, p119).

Later years

After his heyday in the late 1920s, Jabbo – still only in his mid 20s - disappeared from the music scene, apart from a brief resurgence with his innovative big band in the late 30s, until his “rediscovery” in the 1960s.

Jabbo on CD.

Morton and Cook recommend the Classics CD, Jabbo Smith’s Rhythm Aces 1929 – 1938, that brings together his Rhythm Aces sides with 4 tracks by his 1938 band.

 
Weird stuff going on with fonts and sizes. Still a bit weird. But I got too confused changing the tags, so it'll have to stay that way for now. It's at least a bit better.
 
Maltin said:
This version is slightly longer:

Click to expand...


this looks like an excellent series - thanks for posting. BTW at 15mins in on this 1st episode is a section on minstrel shows, which came up on the thread in perhaps a slightly unresolved way, so interesting to get a few more thoughts and context on it.

great quote from it:
"I think that there was something that was so resilient in the black people, and everyone in america could recognise that resilience. and even though it was masquerading, comedy, farce, dance and a form of music, and it seemed like it was uncomplimentary, actually it was something essentially american about it....

and that was the beginning of a long relationship between black and whites, and black entertainment and white appropriation of it, and that strange dance we've been doing with each other since really the beginning of our relationship in america...

its too close, too deep a story, so you have to degrade the relationship, you have to do degrading things so you can live with the tremendous afront to humanity that slavery was."

Sorry to backtrack on the timeline but its interesting stuff i think
 
ska invita said:
this looks like an excellent series - thanks for posting. BTW at 15mins in on this 1st episode is quite a long section on minstrel shows, which came up on the thread in perhaps a slightly unresolved way, so interesting to get a few more thoughts and context on it.
Click to expand...
I've only watched the first episode so far (there are 10). It's not as highly acclaimed as some of Burns' other documentaries but hopefully it is a useful and interesting accompaniment to the thread.
 
Maltin said:
I've only watched the first episode so far (there are 10). It's not as highly acclaimed as some of Burns' other documentaries but hopefully it is a useful and interesting accompaniment to the thread.
Click to expand...
There's a lot of great stuff in it: fantastic footage, interesting interviews, so on. But I found it unsatisfactory in many ways. At the beginning, I thought the editorial focus was a bit odd. There was a lot of weight and time given to things that ought to have been footnotes: the Castles and society dancing; music that wasn't jazz. And at the end, it treats the post bop era in a very perfunctory way, with again a skewed focus. I found, watching it, how I kept thinking what it should have done. The last forty years of jazz from 1961 (it was made in 2001) got only one episode.

Here's a good critique: http://www.gerryhemingway.com/jazzburn.html

"Burns is a classicist, who is offended by the rawer sounds of the blues, its political dimension and inescapable class dynamic."

[...]

"Burns recoils from the fact that Davis, Coltrane, Coleman and their descendents have taken jazz not toward a soft, white-friendly swing sound but deeper into the urban black experience."

[...]

"The series is narrated by a troika of neo-cons: Wynton Marsalis, the favorite trumpeter of the Lincoln Center patrons; writer Albert Murray, who chastised the militant elements of the civil rights and anti-war movements with his pal Ralph Ellison; and Stanley Crouch, the Ward Connerly of music critics. This trio plays the part that Shelby Foote did for Burns' previous epic, the Civil War -- a sentimental, morbid and revisionist reverie"

That said, I did buy the box set.
 
Thanks for the warning. I think the US needs these classicist/preservationist voices, such as Wynton's. My favourite jazz era is late 50s-70s, but having people underline the "classical" nature of this early era and generally treat it with reverence can only be a good thing. Im not sure at what point the narrative that Jazz is the classical music of the US - and the modern era - came about, but its a powerful one and rightly so, and no doubt would have been made against even more conservative voices in academia.
 
ska invita said:
Thanks for the warning. I think the US needs these classicist/preservationist voices, such as Wynton's. My favourite jazz era is late 50s-70s, but having people underline the "classical" nature of this early era and generally treat it with reverence can only be a good thing. Im not sure at what point the narrative that Jazz is the classical music of the US - and the modern era - came about, but its a powerful one and rightly so, and no doubt would have been made against even more conservative voices in academia.
Click to expand...
When Alyn Shipton's book, A New History of Jazz, came out, it was marketed as the "antidote to Ken Burns' Jazz". What Shipton does, that Burns fails to do, is to keep going after 1961, and cover with the same depth free jazz, jazz rock, fusion, the impact of world music on jazz as it percolated across the globe, and so on. He doesn't shy away from Albert Ayler, Miles' On the Corner, or the AACM, and carries on through M Base and hip hop right up to today.

That said, his book isn't perfect, and as an introduction I still recommend Ted Gioia.
 
Been a bit snowed under in real life of late. I'll get round to a new post soon.
But in the meantime, I came across a good story about Jelly Roll Morton being a zombie recently...
 
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