Title: Blowin' hot and cool : jazz and its critics /
Authors: Gennari, John.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press,
Year: 2006
Subjects: Jazz History and criticism; Music Social aspects United States; Jazz Social aspects United States.
Abstract: "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, John Hammond, 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."
Contents: Introduction : (much more than) a few words about jazz -- "Not only a new art form but a new reason for living" -- "As if it were artistic and not just a teenage enthusiasm" : hot collecting across the color line -- Hearing the "noisy lostness" : telling the story of jazz -- Writer's writers and sensitive cats : mapping the new jazz criticism -- Swinging in a high-class groove : mainstreaming jazz in Lenox and Newport -- The shock of the new : black freedom, the counterculture, and 1960s jazz criticism -- Race-ing the bird : Ross Russell's obsessive pursuit of Charlie Parker -- Tangled up in blues : the new jazz renaissance and its discontents -- Conclusion : change of the century.