Jazz Anecdotes: Second Time Around, Book Review Example

This is a book written by a jazz musician for lovers and strangers of jazz alike. It is an attempt to give them a glimpse into the private world of jazz through the candid thoughts, conversations and jokes of some of the greatest musicians of all time. The tone is easy and familiar and it is a priceless treasury of personal stories that would have been lost to oral history if they had not been written down here.

He talks about the nature of a story as its own independent entity. Everyone has experience the evolution of stories into legends even in their own families but he chose to present the stories as they were told among musicians in the jazz community. This means a hybrid of joke, myth and truth but the result was extremely entertaining. I truly enjoyed reading them and got a real sense of the abstract meaning of jazz.

I was really interested in Crow’s chapter on the origins of the word jazz. They seem to sum up the nature of jazz itself- slightly subversive and underground but passionate. This supported my research about how jazz was initially rejected by the Eurocentric culture of America for representing disorder, being uncivilized and subversive to the deterioration of society (Levine). However, as Crow points out, jazz was one of the first original products of the United States making it a true key of American culture since it is homegrown.

I really liked the set-up of the book. Crow took the major themes of jazz and jazz musicians and used them for his chapter titles and supported them with related stories. I thought this was a really creative way to give the reader a good picture of what jazz really is. Some were deep such as Chapter 18: Prejudice– and others were purely anecdotal such as the next chapter, Songs, which looked at funny stories of individual jazz tunes.

Great anecdotes keep the reader engaged and make these historical characters memorable and distinct. For example, Billie Holiday was the jazz musician who was not “black enough” for Detroit. She put on a brave face in the end and put on black face grease to please the directors. We were introduced to jazz’s greats including Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Joe Venuti, Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton among others.

The heyday of jazz was a community of musicians and this book is a tribute to them and their contribution not only to the art of jazz but to the social fabric of the United States. Jazz has had an undeniable impact on the social history of America. He states that “jazz helped to start the erosion of racial prejudice in America” (148) by making music that blacks and whites could come together to enjoy despite their racial differences. Jazz also obviously made a large contribution to music in America. At first it was rejected as not being art at all because it did not fit in with anything that anyone had heard before but it was the persistence of jazz musicians that helped to expand the horizons of what was considered art. Crow shows us that at the end of the day so many people loved jazz simply because it was different, emotional and expressive and that is what ensured its success in the musical world.

In conclusion this book is a celebration of the jokes, good-humor and life of jazz in its early days. It also touches on how jazz impacted America and how the musicians viewed the United States at that time and where jazz fit into it.

References

Crow, Bill. Jazz Anecdotes: Second Time around. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Print.

Levine, Lawrence W. “Jazz and American Culture.” The Journal of American Folklore. 102.403 (1989): 6-22. Print.