The Book of Klezmer: The History, the Music, the Folklore from the 14th Century to the 21st, and: American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots (review)

months from performing in any city with a musician’s local, crucially breaking his momentum. Around the same time, Albert shortsightedly rejected offers from top entertainment managers Joe Glaser and Moe Gale to coordinate his business affairs through a national agency. Finally, he manifested an unwillingness to fire inadequate sidemen, even as they repaid his loyalty by leaving the band at the first sign of a better deal elsewhere. Albert tried desperately, but in vain, to counteract the ill effects of these decisions, at one point even offering to bribe a columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier (who turned him down in print) in return for a little positive copy. Yet by the time the band dissolved it had built up a national following among black listeners, at least. It rose to twenty-sixth place (out of thirty-eight) in the 1940 “Most Popular Band Contest” sponsored by the blackowned Chicago Defender. Though compelling, this story could have resonated more deeply had Wilkinson taken greater pains to place it within the broader context of the swing movement. Surely it is no coincidence that Albert’s career began taking off in 1935 and 1936, the same years that launched Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Jimmie Lunceford, and Count Basie. Wilkinson acknowledges the crucial role of an expanded, centralized music industry, but says little about the fairly abrupt popularity of swing music in 1935. Similarly, when Wilkinson reports Albert’s refusal to sell arrangements to white bandleaders in 1936, he fails to contrast this with the actions of other black musicians—Henderson, Jimmy Mundy, Edgar Sampson, and Sy Oliver, for example —who prospered by doing just the opposite. Wilkinson might have enriched his presentation by consulting Scott DeVeaux’s magisterial The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), the best historical study of economics and race during the Swing Era. Wilkinson, for instance, seems unaware of the slump in the swing industry in 1939, which DeVeaux discusses in detail. Thus, he interprets Albert’s need to advertise for musicians in that year as evidence merely “that Albert was losing his image as the leader of a band on its way to fame and thus was finding it harder to replace personnel” (p. 199). But high turnover was common in 1939, even in name bands, because star sidemen and other aspirants were organizing new bands at a tremendous rate, glutting the market. With so many bands needing musicians, it was inevitable that lesser-known organizations would have to struggle to keep good players. Wilkinson devotes an entire chapter to Albert’s four Vocalion discs, records which provoked a mixed critical response. Albert J. McCarthy estimated that the Albert band must have been “superior to a number of name units of the day,” but Gunther Schuller considered it merely “typical of mid-1930s Texas provincial jazz” (p. 166). Wilkinson acknowledges the problems of intonation, ragged execution, and cluttered arrangements cited by Schuller, yet he takes umbrage at Schuller’s overall negative view of the band. Arguing that Albert enjoyed popularity in his day, Wilkinson considers any evaluation of the band on the strength of its few recordings to be “at best tentative, at worst unfair” (p. 139). Apparently convinced that Albert deserved —and should have achieved—national standing, Wilkinson spends much of the chapter contending with Schuller over the degree to which certain Albert arrangements borrowed elements from Duke Ellington or Jimmie Lunceford. Mustering only faint praise himself, however, Wilkinson does little to dispel the impression that, notwithstanding Albert’s momentary popularity, his music did not cry out to be heard beyond the regional level.