Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics / Edition 1

by John Gennari

Overview

In the illustrious and richly documented history of American jazz, no figure has been more controversial than the jazz critic. Jazz critics can be revered or reviled—often both—but they should not be ignored. And while the tradition of jazz has been covered from seemingly every angle, nobody has ever turned the pen back on itself to chronicle the many writers who have helped define how we listen to and how we understand jazz. That is, of course, until now.

In Blowin’ Hot and Cool, John Gennari provides a definitive history of jazz criticism from the 1920s to the present. The music itself is prominent in his account, as are the musicians—from Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington to Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Roscoe Mitchell, and beyond. But the work takes its shape from fascinating stories of the tradition’s key critics—Leonard Feather, Martin Williams, Whitney Balliett, Dan Morgenstern, Gary Giddins, and Stanley Crouch, among many others. Gennari is the first to show the many ways these critics have mediated the relationship between the musicians and the audience—not merely as writers, but in many cases as producers, broadcasters, concert organizers, and public intellectuals as well.

For Gennari, the jazz tradition is not so much a collection of recordings and performances as it is a rancorous debate—the dissonant noise clamoring in response to the sounds of jazz. Against the backdrop of racial strife, class and gender issues, war, and protest that has defined the past seventy-five years in America, Blowin’ Hot and Cool brings to the fore jazz’s most vital critics and the role they have played not only in defining the history of jazz but also in shaping jazz’s significance in American culture and life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226289229
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	06/21/2006
Edition description:	1
Pages:	494
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

John Gennari is assistant professor of English at the University of Vermont, where he also directs the ALANA U.S. Ethnic Studies Program.


 

Read an Excerpt

Blowin' Hot and Cool

Jazz and Its Critics

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By John Gennari

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2006 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-226-28922-2

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Chapter One

"Not Only a New Art Form but a New Reason for Living"

Needed: White Guys without Dates

In July 1935, a twenty-one-year-old Englishman named Leonard Feather set sail for New York for the first of two visits that year intended to spark his fledgling career as a jazz writer. Feather had cut his writing teeth apprenticing for German and French movie trade magazines, but for the previous eighteen months he had turned his focus to jazz, publishing articles in Britain's Melody Maker, Gramophone, Tune Times, and Swing Music. Also a budding pianist and songwriter, Feather's knowledge of jazz had come mainly through records. For European jazz cognoscenti of the 1930s, a pilgrimage to New York, the jazz recording capital, was de rigueur. As Feather relates in his 1987 autobiography, his first 1935 trip held especially great promise because of the person who was waiting for his ship to dock in New York harbor, ready to shepherd him around to the city's jazz spots: John Hammond.

Hammond, then twenty-five, was well known in British jazz circles as a record producer, talent scout, journalist, and social critic. He had been commissioned by Columbia to produce a series ofsessions from 1933 to 1935 for British release, and he had started his career as a jazz writer in the early 1930s in Melody Maker, Gramophone, and another British publication called Rhythm. It would still be a few years before Hammond established his dominion over the U.S. jazz scene, but the foundation had been firmly laid in 1933. In a feverish seventy-two-hour stretch in November of that year, Hammond supervised the last recordings of Bessie Smith and then the first recordings of Billie Holiday. These sessions employed a racially mixed group of sidemen, including the Jewish clarinetist Benny Goodman-an early example of the integrationist agenda that would become Hammond's hallmark.

Before his first 1935 transatlantic journey, Feather, who came from a wealthy Jewish family in London, had met only one black person in his life-Louis Armstrong, whom he had contrived to meet at a bar near London's Palladium the night of Armstrong's first British concert in 1932. Feather encountered Armstrong-he says in the autobiography-as "a mature and greatly respected artist," unconcerned about his racial identity and unaware of the history of American race relations. But mainly through reading Hammond's dispatches in the British music press over the next few years, Feather learned about the existence of Jim Crow segregation and racial oppression. This knowledge did not dampen his enthusiasm for crossing the racial border in search of cultural riches.

This meant Harlem. Within hours of his arrival, Feather found himself at the Apollo Theater, the leading shrine of black vaudeville entertainment. In spite of the building's "exotic, funky appeal," Feather found the evening's bill to be a let-down. While comedian Pigmeat Markham was "raw and raucously funny," that week's house orchestra, Erskine Hawkins and his Bama State Collegians, struck Feather as "not the equal of the black bands whose records I had been collecting." Even more disappointing was Bessie Smith, whose performance Feather deemed "pathetically unrepresentative of her early grandeur." Feather wondered what this meant to the reputation of a performer whom Hammond regarded as the greatest artist that his country had produced. Would she be remembered as the great blues empress of the 1920s, or as the woman he had seen on this night, who had drunk too much and had "proclaimed racy lyrics in a strange, throbbing voice"? Would she be remembered at all? What good was it that he and Hammond knew of her former glory when "to almost all whites she was unknown," while "to most blacks she was an insignificant, half-forgotten vaudeville performer"?

* * *

Hammond guided him deeper into the Harlem night. Next it was fifteen blocks north to the Savoy Ballroom, the "Home of Happy Feet," where swing, the stomping, dance-oriented music that originated in Harlem, captivated the bodies of hundreds of the young and the young at heart. Here things really came alive:

The impact of the moment I walked into the Savoy was immediate and too startling ever to be forgotten. The sensation was one of removal from any world I had known. During the first five minutes I felt I had absorbed more music than I had heard in all my years of listening to jazz impersonalized by the obstacle of the phonograph.

As the Teddy Hill Orchestra swung hard, Feather marveled at the cohesion of the rhythm section and the power of the soloists, especially Chu Berry on tenor sax, Roy Eldridge on trumpet, and Dickie Wells on trombone. Oddly, to Feather, the dancing "jitterbugs," caught up in a stomping groove that literally shook the parquet floor, seemed little interested in the finer points of the music. "The music that made such a feverish emotional impact on my sensibilities," he observed, "appealed to this audience mainly on utilitarian grounds." Not until "John and I, joined soon by a few others who perhaps were encouraged by our initiative," did anyone sidle up close to the bandstand, the better to scrutinize and appreciate the musicians at work.

Two young white men without dates, in a room full of good-timing cheer and ecstatic bodily release, position themselves between the musicians and the audience-here, in microcosm, was the Ur-stance of the jazz critic: poised on the seam between artistic creation and popular consumption, close to but also crucially distinct from the dancing mass body, caught up in an imagined sense of privileged intellectual and emotional communion with the music. Overlaying this subtle geography of inside/outside was both a self-consciousness about racial and class difference and a correspondingly self-justifying sense of exceptionalism, a conceit that the critic's exalted purpose exempted him from the conventional patterns of cross-racial exchange. So, while surprised by the Savoy patrons' seeming indifference to the music qua music, Feather was pleased by the crowd's interracial composition and egalitarian dynamic. He made a point during this sojourn of not visiting the Cotton Club, offended by its policy of admitting blacks only as performers and uncomfortable with the thought of being confused with the rich whites whose "slumming" filled the coffers of the club's mobster proprietors. Feather knew that Hammond came from great wealth, that his mother was a Vanderbilt and his father an heir to a Southern fortune and one of the high-powered corporate lawyers of the day. He was sure, however-or at least needed to believe-that Hammond went to Harlem not to service his own decadent pleasures, but to work earnestly and valiantly toward racial equality and recognition of black artistic excellence.

In Feather's eyes, Hammond was "more at ease in Harlem than almost any other white American could feel." Fancying a similar reputation for himself, Feather was pleased to discover that, paradoxically, his outsider status might help him become a privileged insider:

The Savoy engendered in me oddly mixed emotions of alienation (due to my British reserve rather than my whiteness) and of belonging, for it was at the ballroom, and at other retreats north of Central Park, that I would quickly learn to feel more at one with my surroundings than anywhere else either at home or abroad. There was an immediate sense of being welcome in a community where, as Hammond and others had warned, people from downtown might expect to find themselves regarded with acute suspicion. Not being an American, as I soon found out, fortified my credentials.

Through Hammond, Feather met and befriended a number of "accessible and hospitable" musicians, including trumpeter Red Allen and pianist Teddy Wilson, and made strategic contacts with other music and entertainment industry personnel. Clarence Williams, the early blues and jazz songwriter and pianist then operating as a music publisher, bought two of Feather's songs, boosting his confidence to continue writing blues and jazz material. Romeo Dougherty, the entertainment editor of the New York Amsterdam News, made Feather the paper's first white contributor, giving him a column as a London correspondent reporting on that city's West Indian club scene. Metronome editor George Simon also retained Feather as a London correspondent reporting on British jazz recording and concert developments, including his own role in helping Benny Carter assemble the first interracial and international jazz orchestra.

Leonard Feather had found his calling. He would not be the dutiful Jewish son, joining his father's business in clothing and real estate. In late 1939, he would move permanently to the United States, where, until his death in 1994, he was a ubiquitous presence on the jazz scene as a journalist, record and concert producer, publicist, radio programmer, encyclopedist, composer, lyricist, and educator. "Over the amazingly long, prolific, and frequently controversial run of his career," Gary Giddins eulogized, Feather "decisively supplanted Hammond as jazz's most important critic and chronicler." Feather's career would include several acrimonious public feuds with Hammond, the earliest coming over Duke Ellington's creative direction when the composer and bandleader began to explore scored-through concert forms. While Feather became a herald of "progress" and "freedom" in jazz and supported most of its stylistic innovations until souring on certain strains of the post-1960 avant garde, Hammond-who carried his scouting, promotional, and production talents into the genres of gospel, blues, rhythm-and-blues, and rock into the 1980s-scorned bebop and other post-World War II modern jazz styles, sounds he regarded as "cerebral gymnastics" that emphasized "technique at the expense of musical emotion." But no critic has ever wielded as much influence over the development and direction of jazz as Hammond did during the Swing Era. Feather, in 1964, attempted to summarize this influence:

Hammond's importance [was] inestimable. It is worthwhile speculating what the course of jazz might have been without him. Benny Goodman, for whom jazz in 1934 was not a consuming passion, might have lived out his life as a house musician at NBC or CBS. The swing era, at least by that name or that figurehead, would never have arrived. Meade Lux Lewis would probably have spent the rest of his days as a cabdriver or janitor, and we critics who have written about it with such self-righteous knowledge might never have heard that boogie-woogie existed. Count Basie might have stayed in Midwestern obscurity. Teddy Wilson certainly would not have joined Goodman, and it might have been years before the color line was broken. As for Billie Holiday, it is chilling to contemplate what her fate could have been had Hammond not sponsored her.... The argument that talent will out-that if Hammond had not launched these artists, someone else would have-is glib and totally unconvincing.

Hammond, as Dan Morgenstern has said, needed to be needed. Duke Ellington clearly didn't need him, nor did the beboppers and other modern jazz musicians whose ideas about jazz's post-World War II future left Hammond behind. Did Billie Holiday need him in the desperate way that Feather suggests? Did Bessie Smith need him as badly as Hammond always thought she did? Did Hammond need them just as badly? These are thorny, probably unanswerable questions. But in 1935, when Leonard Feather needed a Virgil to guide him through swinging Harlem, John Hammond was his man.

* * *

Swinging Left with the "Great White Father"

... John Hammond and Leonard Feather were anticommunist liberals whose civil rights activism grew out of a tradition of Leftist politics in the jazz world that started in the early 1930s and intensified with the Popular Front initiative of the Communist Party after 1935. Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, Harlem CP-sponsored dances, Scottsboro benefits, Lincoln Brigade and Russian war relief events, union rallies, and other Left-oriented functions featured prominent jazz artists such as Benny Carter, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Chick Webb, Cab Calloway, and Bessie Smith. At the center of this activity was John Hammond. Hammond was never a card-carrying party member; as Feather later put it, he "regarded the Communists as opportunists who blew hot and cold on the race issue." As an ardent integrationist, Hammond was especially at odds with the party's Black Belt Thesis, which called for the establishment of a separate black state in the American South. He was also, along with Charles Edward Smith and other jazz proponents on the radical Left, in opposition to the Communist Party hierarchy's doctrinaire view of jazz as a debased commercial mass culture and secular opiate of the masses. Smith, writing in the Daily Worker, argued that spirituals, the blues, and hot jazz were the authentic folk musical forms of the black working class and that the Marxist critique was more properly aimed at popular sweet music. Hammond was part of a group of young blacks and Jews associated with the Harlem branch of the CPUSA who, in tandem with radical student movements on college campuses across New York City, diverged from the party line in embracing jazz as an authentic, unadulterated popular art. While some on the Communist Left-including many at the New Masses-continued to regard jazz as irredeemably bourgeois, the Popular Front opened up a space for jazz as a politically expedient tool of interracial coalition-building. Hammond adroitly used this opportunity to publicize his interlocking campaigns on behalf of black jazz musicians, integration, and social justice. "The people at the New Masses just hated jazz," Hammond said, "but, since it was the days of the United Front ... they thought [it] would be good for their cultural image to have somebody write about jazz, particularly black jazz."

* * *

Hailing from the opposite end of the class spectrum than many of the musicians in his orbit, and prone to an imperious style, Hammond generated plenty of criticism that labeled him a paternalist and a tyrant. Some saw a holier-than-thou edge to his political zeal and his solicitude for black musicians. Hammond helped Benny Goodman and other white musicians who had a strong swing and blues orientation, like Red Norvo and Mildred Bailey. But it was black musicians, particularly those he could take credit for discovering or rediscovering and those whose poverty and neglect he could publicize with muckraking fervor, that most fueled Hammond's sense of self-righteousness. Otis Ferguson, who wrote on jazz and the popular arts in the New Republic, came from a working-class background and shared much of Hammond's politics, but he thought Hammond-whom he depicted as a pampered rich boy-sacrificed his critical integrity to his ideological convictions:

He is all for the working class. Fine. He's dedicated to the cause of the Negro. Fine. But he's too apt to shut his ear to the music of someone who didn't pay off on a date or said nuts to the lettuce pickers and call it criticism. And when he goes around saying "white musician" the way you'd use the term "greaseball," he not only confuses his readers and upsets his own standards but starts the Jim Crow car all over again, in reverse.

The Nation's classical music critic, B. H. Haggin, who had worked with Hammond at both WEVD and the Brooklyn Eagle in the early 1930s, thought Hammond's political concerns had destroyed his talent as a critic. "Hammond," he wrote, "began with his mind, his sharp ears, his fine musical sensitiveness fixed on the music," but over time had allowed himself to be concerned with "innumerable extraneous and irrelevant considerations, such as whether a company's plant was unionized or a player was a Negro."

Hammond, Duke Ellington, and the "Lost Cause"

One of the strongest attacks on Hammond came from Duke Ellington, writing in Down Beat in 1939. Ellington acknowledged that Hammond had earned the gratitude of some musicians but charged that his judgment had become "slightly warped" and his "prejudices a little bit unwieldy" because of his work as "an ardent propagandist and champion of the 'lost cause,'" identifying himself with "the interests of the minorities, the Negro peoples, to a lesser degree, the Jew, and to the underdog, in the form of the Communist party." Ellington soon retracted the red-baiting charge: "It was my intention to merely infer that the political affiliations of Mr. Hammond bordered on the 'left wing.'"

(Continues...)

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All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: (Much More than) a Few Words about Jazz
1. "Not Only a New Art Form but a New Reason for Living"
2. "As If It Were Artistic and Not Just a Teenage Enthusiasm"
Hot Collecting across the Color Line
3. Hearing the "Noisy Lostness"
Telling the Story of Jazz
4. Writer's Writers and Sensitive Cats
Mapping the New Jazz Criticism
5. Swinging in a High-Class Groove
Mainstreaming Jazz in Lenox and Newport
6. The Shock of the New
Black Freedom, the Counterculture, and 1960s Jazz Criticism
7. Race-ing the Bird
Ross Russell's Obsessive Pursuit of Charlie Parker
8. Tangled Up in Blues
The New Jazz Renaissance and Its Discontents
Conclusion: Change of the Century
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

This is the secret history of jazz—groundbreaking and essential.”—David Hajdu

David Hajdu

"Gennari's Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics is an original and fair-minded account of how American writers have constructed cultural meanings for jazz. Gennari, an English professor who writes vivid prose, shows how canon formation and the proposition of jazz as high art did not start with Jazz at the Lincoln center but is continuation of a project begun by writers in the 1930s. . . . This is a timely and important study."
 

Down Beat - Paul de Barros

"This is a valuable book, and a fascinating one, ranging from the important role played by the critic, John Hammond . . . in the 1930s, to the epic battles over the 'Young Lions' movement in the 1980s."

The Independent - Sholto Byrnes

"The story that Gennari has to tell is compelling, his research is deep, and his argument is sound. My vision of jazz is distinctly richer for having read this book."

Ellingtonia - John Mason

The first sustained scholarly book exclusively about jazz criticism—and, not least, about the passions that have driven and surrounded it—Blowin' Hot and Cool is thorough, absorbing and original, an obsessive study of professional obsessives that will circumvent the need for any other.“
 

Nation - David Yaffe

Blowin’ Hot and Cool is an astonishing book: one can see it as a warm, generous critique of jazz, or a trenchant and incisive way of loving it. John Gennari considers all the important people who have shaped jazz criticism over the past seventy-five years, opening up their lives to us and taking their arguments seriously. Somehow, he weaves these insights into an intellectual history of jazz, perhaps its first. I can’t think of a book on jazz that is more ambitious, more beautifully written, or more heartfelt.”—Scott DeVeaux, author of The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History


 

Scott DeVeaux

Blowin’ Hot and Cool simultaneously functions as a history of jazz, an intellectual  history  of  jazz,  and  a  survey  of  jazz  discourses—no  small  feat—all  as  rendered  through  the figure of  the  jazz  critic.

American Literature

"Gennari delivers a book that, in chronicling nearly a century of debates within jazz, links those debates to wider discourses in society. . . . This is a strong opening statement on a subject ripe for fresh analysis, confidently argued, with which anyone interested in jazz, its history, and its fluctuating but significant place in American culture will want to engage."

Belles Lettres - Benjamin Cawthra

Finally, a book that lays bare the inner workings of jazz criticism! John Gennari’s Blowin’ Hot and Cool probes this fascinating story-behind-the-story, revealing how our appreciation of the music has been irreversibly shaped by a handful of influential writers who never recorded a solo or wrote a chart. This book belongs on the shelf of any serious fan of jazz.”—Ted Gioia, author of The History of Jazz
 

Ted Gioia

"Gennari's prose conveys a sense of immediate importance and makes for a surprising rich narrative structure. . . . [The author's] ability to merge the biographical, historical, intellectual, formal, geographic, and ideological trajectories that informed the combination of music, critical discourse, and audience appreciation makes it clear that the writing about jazz is an essential part of our understanding of the superstructure of American modernity."

American Book Review - Ed Pavlic

"Thoughtfully questioning one's taste in jazz is like cleansing your palate between the courses of a rich meal. Only the very best writing can provoke such fundamental questioning. Count Gennari among the very best jazz writers. . . . If you're ready to open your mind, this book is for you."

All About Jazz - Norman Weinstein

Admirable in its scholarly apparatus and painstaking research. Its subject—the history of jazz criticism and critics—. . . is a fascinating if rather oblique history of jazz told from the back stairs. . . . Gennari’s book is excellent.

Literary Review - William Palmer

"Reading [Blowin' Hot and Cool] is a liberating experience, one that brings the music closer. . . . This is a rich book, bursting with anecdote and observation."

Times Literary Supplement - Stephen Brown

In this exemplary cultural history, John Gennari proves himself to be a talented scholar and a compelling storyteller. Original and well-written, Blowin’ Hot and Cool provides a nuanced analysis of the jazz critic as cultural arbiter, pedagogue, and controversial, but necessary advocate of the music.”—Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday


 

Farah Jasmine Griffin

"One of the last great untold stories in jazz has been addressed."

Post and Courier - Jack McCray

"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."

Mike Hobart - Financial Times

"This is a well-written overview of many different perspectives of a rich and engaging music. . . . This book is not just rich in information and storytelling, but also in the ebb and flow of the passions that underpin jazz. In the process, Gennari finds decades of discourse and disagreement, alliances and arguments. . . . Contrasting and blending together the perspectives of many different critics over three quarters of a century, this book is a truly fresh look at the history of jazz."

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Scott Hanley

"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."

Mike Hobart - Financial Times

"Gennari delivers a book that, in chronicling nearly a century of debates within jazz, links those debates to wider discourses in society. . . . This is a strong opening statement on a subject ripe for fresh analysis, confidently argued, with which anyone interested in jazz, its history, and its fluctuating but significant place in American culture will want to engage."

— Benjamin Cawthra

Belles Lettres

"Gennari's prose conveys a sense of immediate importance and makes for a surprising rich narrative structure. . . . [The author's] ability to merge the biographical, historical, intellectual, formal, geographic, and ideological trajectories that informed the combination of music, critical discourse, and audience appreciation makes it clear that the writing about jazz is an essential part of our understanding of the superstructure of American modernity."

— Ed Pavlic

American Book Review

"The story that Gennari has to tell is compelling, his research is deep, and his argument is sound. My vision of jazz is distinctly richer for having read this book."

— John Mason

Ellingtonia

"This is a valuable book, and a fascinating one, ranging from the important role played by the critic, John Hammond . . . in the 1930s, to the epic battles over the 'Young Lions' movement in the 1980s."

— Sholto Byrnes

The Independent

"Reading [Blowin' Hot and Cool] is a liberating experience, one that brings the music closer. . . . This is a rich book, bursting with anecdote and observation."

— Stephen Brown

Times Literary Supplement

"Thoughtfully questioning one's taste in jazz is like cleansing your palate between the courses of a rich meal. Only the very best writing can provoke such fundamental questioning. Count Gennari among the very best jazz writers. . . . If you're ready to open your mind, this book is for you."

— Norman Weinstein

All About Jazz

“The first sustained scholarly book exclusively about jazz criticism--and, not least, about the passions that have driven and surrounded it--Blowin' Hot and Cool is thorough, absorbing and original, an obsessive study of professional obsessives that will circumvent the need for any other.“—David Yaffe, Nation

 

— David Yaffe

Nation

"This is a well-written overview of many different perspectives of a rich and engaging music. . . . This book is not just rich in information and storytelling, but also in the ebb and flow of the passions that underpin jazz. In the process, Gennari finds decades of discourse and disagreement, alliances and arguments. . . . Contrasting and blending together the perspectives of many different critics over three quarters of a century, this book is a truly fresh look at the history of jazz."

— Scott Hanley

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"One of the last great untold stories in jazz has been addressed."

— Jack McCray

Post and Courier

“Admirable in its scholarly apparatus and painstaking research. Its subject--the history of jazz criticism and critics--. . . is a fascinating if rather oblique history of jazz told from the back stairs. . . . Gennari’s book is excellent.”--William Palmer, Literary Review

— William Palmer

Literary Review

"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."

— Financial Times

Mike Hobart

When this reviewer thinks of jazz critics, he thinks of pretentious, opinionated white men with little or no musical talent arguing among themselves about obscure artists and recordings. Gennari (English, Univ. of Vermont) does not do a lot to change that perception, but he does perform something magical: he manages to make the role and history of the jazz critic interesting. This finely written, thought-provoking chronicle of the most prominent jazz writers of the past century begins with pioneers John Hammond and Leonard Feather (who helped the likes of Duke Ellington get much needed attention) and ends with modern-day jazz critics like Stanly Crouch and Gary Giddens. Gennari connects the critic to the musicians, showing the roles they played in disseminating information and connecting the acts to the audience. For example, in the chapter on novelist Ralph Ellison's jazz interpretations, he links Ellison's childhood in Oklahoma to his insistence in the 1950s that jazz was not part of the American mainstream but merely part of the folklore of society. This is an essential purchase for any comprehensive jazz collection. Highly recommended. Todd Spires, Bradley Univ. Lib., Peoria, IL Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

"Gennari's prose conveys a sense of immediate importance and makes for a surprising rich narrative structure. . . . [The author's] ability to merge the biographical, historical, intellectual, formal, geographic, and ideological trajectories that informed the combination of music, critical discourse, and audience appreciation makes it clear that the writing about jazz is an essential part of our understanding of the superstructure of American modernity."

Ed Pavlicn Book Review

"[Gennari] does perform something magical: he manages to make the role and history of the jazz critic interesting. This finely written, thought-provoking chronicle of the most prominent jazz writers of the past century begins with pioneers John Hammond and Leonard Feather (who helped the likes of Duke Ellington get much needed attention) and ends with modern-day jazz critics like Stanly Crouch and Gary Giddens. Gennari connects the critic to the musicians, showing the roles they played in disseminating information and connecting the acts to the audience. This is an essential purchase for any comprehensive jazz collection. Highly recommended."--Todd Spires "Library Journal" (6/15/2006 12:00:00 AM)

"Gennari delivers a book that, in chronicling nearly a century of debates within jazz, links those debates to wider discourses in society. . . . This is a strong opening statement on a subject ripe for fresh analysis, confidently argued, with which anyone interested in jazz, its history, and its fluctuating but significant place in American culture will want to engage."--Benjamin Cawthra "Belles Lettres"

"Gennari's prose conveys a sense of immediate importance and makes for a surprising rich narrative structure. . . . [The author's] ability to merge the biographical, historical, intellectual, formal, geographic, and ideological trajectories that informed the combination of music, critical discourse, and audience appreciation makes it clear that the writing about jazz is an essential part of our understanding of the superstructure of American modernity."--Ed Pavlic "American Book Review"

"One of the last great untold stories in jazz has been addressed."--Jack McCray "Post and Courier" (9/3/2006 12:00:00 AM)

"Reading [Blowin' Hot and Cool] is a liberating experience, one that brings the music closer. . . . This is a rich book, bursting with anecdote and observation."--Stephen Brown "Times Literary Supplement" (6/15/2007 12:00:00 AM)

"The story that Gennari has to tell is compelling, his research is deep, and his argument is sound. My vision of jazz is distinctly richer for having read this book."--John Mason "Ellingtonia"

"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."--Financial Times "Mike Hobart" (7/28/2006 12:00:00 AM)

"This is a valuable book, and a fascinating one, ranging from the important role played by the critic, John Hammond . . . in the 1930s, to the epic battles over the 'Young Lions' movement in the 1980s."--Sholto Byrnes "The Independent"

"This is a well-written overview of many different perspectives of a rich and engaging music. . . . This book is not just rich in information and storytelling, but also in the ebb and flow of the passions that underpin jazz. In the process, Gennari finds decades of discourse and disagreement, alliances and arguments. . . . Contrasting and blending together the perspectives of many different critics over three quarters of a century, this book is a truly fresh look at the history of jazz."--Scott Hanley "Pittsburgh Post-Gazette" (9/10/2006 12:00:00 AM)

"Thoughtfully questioning one's taste in jazz is like cleansing your palate between the courses of a rich meal. Only the very best writing can provoke such fundamental questioning. Count Gennari among the very best jazz writers. . . . If you're ready to open your mind, this book is for you."--Norman Weinstein "All About Jazz"

"Blowin' Hot and Cool simultaneously functions as a history of jazz, an intellectual history of jazz, and a survey of jazz discourses--no small feat--all as rendered through the figure of the jazz critic."-- "American Literature"

"Blowin' Hot and Cool is an astonishing book: one can see it as a warm, generous critique of jazz, or a trenchant and incisive way of loving it. John Gennari considers all the important people who have shaped jazz criticism over the past seventy-five years, opening up their lives to us and taking their arguments seriously. Somehow, he weaves these insights into an intellectual history of jazz, perhaps its first. I can't think of a book on jazz that is more ambitious, more beautifully written, or more heartfelt."--Scott DeVeaux, author of The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History

--Scott DeVeaux (2/6/2006 12:00:00 AM)

"Admirable in its scholarly apparatus and painstaking research. Its subject--the history of jazz criticism and critics--. . . is a fascinating if rather oblique history of jazz told from the back stairs. . . . Gennari's book is excellent."--William Palmer "Literary Review" (8/1/2006 12:00:00 AM)

"Finally, a book that lays bare the inner workings of jazz criticism! John Gennari's Blowin' Hot and Cool probes this fascinating story-behind-the-story, revealing how our appreciation of the music has been irreversibly shaped by a handful of influential writers who never recorded a solo or wrote a chart. This book belongs on the shelf of any serious fan of jazz."--Ted Gioia, author of The History of Jazz
--Ted Gioia (2/6/2006 12:00:00 AM)

"Gennari's Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics is an original and fair-minded account of how American writers have constructed cultural meanings for jazz. Gennari, an English professor who writes vivid prose, shows how canon formation and the proposition of jazz as high art did not start with Jazz at the Lincoln center but is continuation of a project begun by writers in the 1930s. . . . This is a timely and important study." --Paul de Barros "Down Beat" (9/1/2006 12:00:00 AM)

"In this exemplary cultural history, John Gennari proves himself to be a talented scholar and a compelling storyteller. Original and well-written, Blowin' Hot and Cool provides a nuanced analysis of the jazz critic as cultural arbiter, pedagogue, and controversial, but necessary advocate of the music."--Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday

--Farah Jasmine Griffin (2/6/2006 12:00:00 AM)

"The first sustained scholarly book exclusively about jazz criticism--and, not least, about the passions that have driven and surrounded it--Blowin' Hot and Cool is thorough, absorbing and original, an obsessive study of professional obsessives that will circumvent the need for any other." -- David Yaffe "Nation" (10/2/2006 12:00:00 AM)

"This is the secret history of jazz--groundbreaking and essential."--David Hajdu

--David Hajdu (2/6/2006 12:00:00 AM)

From the Publisher