The Jazz Scene

From 1955-65 the historian Eric Hobsbawm took the pseudonym 'Francis Newton' and wrote a monthly column for the New Statesman on jazz - music he had loved ever since discovering it as a boy in 1933 ('the year Adolf Hitler took power in Germany'). Hobsbawm's column led to his writing a critical history, The Jazz Scene (1959). This enhanced edition from 1993 adds later writings by Hobsbawm in which he meditates further 'on why jazz is not only a marvellous noise but a central concern for anyone concerned with twentieth-century society and the twentieth-century arts.' 'All the greats are covered in passing (Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday), while further space is given to Duke Ellington, Ray Charles, Thelonious Monk, Mahalia Jackson, and Sidney Bechet ... Perhaps Hobsbawm's tastiest comments are about the business side and work ethics, where his historian's eye strips the jazz scene down to its commercial spine.' Kirkus Reviews

This is an informal history of New Orleans jazz from the turn of the 20th century to the present day, as told by the musicians themselves in interviews conducted by the author.

In the 1950s and ’60s, co-operative jazz clubs opened their doors in Canada in response to new forms of jazz expression emerging after the war and the lack of performance spaces outside major urban centres. Operated by the musicians themselves, these hip new clubs created spaces where jazz musicians practised their art. Live at the Cellar looks at this unique period in the development of jazz in Canada. Centered on Vancouver’s legendary Cellar club, it explores the ways in which these clubs functioned as sites for the performance and exploration of jazz as well as for countercultural expression. Jago combines original research with archival evidence, interviews, and photographs to shine a light on a period of astonishing musical activity that paved the way for Canada’s vibrant jazz scene today.

“Nat Hentoff may very well be the foremost jazz historian in the world because he was there to witness firsthand the music’s evolution from big band and swing to fusion and bossa nova; and to dive into the souls of the men and women who created it from Ellington, Basie, Miles, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald and Dinah Washington, among many others. At the Jazz Band Ball: Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene is an invaluable archive of not only the musical influence of America’s only indigenous music on the world, but its enormous impact as an engine for social change as well. It is a book that should be read by every young musician, music fan, and educator in America.”—Quincy Jones "The very best witnesses in the worlds of the law, aesthetic evaluation, social contexts of imposing significance, and artistic public performance are those who accurately understand what they have seen or what they are seeing. Nat Hentoff has been and continues to be a star witness in every one of those arenas. One of the greatest contributions of his jazz writing is that he has never felt the need to condescend to black people or to let the dictates of sociology diminish the universal significance of what they do when they do it well. Nat knows that so many jazz musicians have done what they do superbly, quite often expressing themselves beyond the narrows of color. As sensitive to the Americana of jazz as he is to its transcendent revelations about the sound of the human heart, Nat Hentoff is part of our American luck."—Stanley Crouch “At the Jazz Band Ball is full of nuggets from Nat's rich lode of wit and wisdom, gleaned in a lifetime of fellowship with jazz and its makers.”—Dan Morgenstern, Director, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University; author of Living With Jazz: A Reader

New York City has always been a mecca in the history of jazz, and in many ways the city’s jazz scene is more important now than ever before. Blowin’ the Blues Away examines how jazz has thrived in New York following its popular resurgence in the 1980s. Using interviews, in-person observation, and analysis of live and recorded events, ethnomusicologist Travis A. Jackson explores both the ways in which various participants in the New York City jazz scene interpret and evaluate performance, and the criteria on which those interpretations and evaluations are based. Through the notes and words of its most accomplished performers and most ardent fans, jazz appears not simply as a musical style, but as a cultural form intimately influenced by and influential upon American concepts of race, place, and spirituality.