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Steve Dollar: Jazz Guide, New York City (The Little Bookroom, 2003)
Steve Dollar: Jazz Guide, New York City (The Little Bookroom, 2003)
Review by John Stevenson
Dollar takes readers page by page into New York City's bustling jazz culture, bombarding us with solid information on over 60 venues where good jazz and improvised music may be had. Complementing this slender volume is the veteran journalist's crisp phrasing, sharp wit, and riff-like, musical prose.
A book like this has been patiently awaited for yonks. New York City is arguably America's most important place of jazz pilgrimage.
It should not be forgotten that Harlem flourished during the 1920s and 30s as a magnet for Afro-American music, literature, and the visionary aesthetics of jazz-infleuneced painters such as Romare Bearden. Minton's Playhouse, one of Harlem's storied nightspots, was one of the important hothouses for the development of bop and bebop during the 1940s and 50s.
Dollar ushers us into the vertiginous cellar of the Village Vanguard on Seventh Avenue, where the spirits of jazz avatars inspire successive generations of listeners and musicians. The reader is driven witless with hunger after delicious descriptions of "Sunday gospel brunches" at the Sugar Hill Bistro just off Amsterdam Avenue. We eavesdrop on small jazz groups wedged precariously between the compact discs in the Bowery's Downtown Music Haven. The chapter on Sonny Rollins's legendary sabbatical under the Williamsburg Bridge is fascinating, and there are well-written morsels of fact on jazz festivals, jazz radio and the Lincoln Centre jazz programmes.
The divisions between New York's more humble uptown jazz sessions (with the exception of the Cotton Club and the Savoy Ballroom) on the one hand, and Gotham's swanky downtown jazz soirees on the other, are not accidental: race runs like a fault-line through American culture.
Disappointing in an otherwise insightful guide is Dollar's refusal to even cursorily place the development of jazz in New York within a proper socio-historical context. Why, for example, did innovative music thrive in metropolises such as New York? Could similar developments have taken place below the Mason Dixon line? Why indeed, was New York important in the formation of Salsa and Latin jazz for that matter? That said, both seasoned devotee and general interest reader will find this book quite informative. Proof that Bird lives and jazz thrives in the Big Apple.
from ejazznews
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