BLOWIN’ HOT AND COOL: Jazz and Its Critics
by John Gennari
University of Chicago Press ₤22.50 480 pages

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.

Gennari concentrates on the writers that you might stumble across on album sleeves and in the media, such as Marshall Stearns and Nat Hentoff. Their voices make a raucously sectarian babble in which there isn’t even a consensus about what jazz actually is. Along the way, the hidden agenda of the radical, liberal and some not so liberal factions of the American intelligentsia are unpicked.

Yet far from mocking a Pythonesque bun-fight, Gennari shows enormous sympathy towards this handful of university-educated, mostly white and nearly all male critics, who wrested jazz writing from pulp fiction fantasy and fanzine superficiality, to create a body of critical writing that became a template for serious popular music journalism.

Gennari relates the schisms in jazz criticism to the broader rifts within American academia. Here the ideas of Ezra Pound, F.R. Leavis, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse are transported into the jazz arena, where issues of racial inequality, blatant commercial interest and state sponsorship during the cold war had immediate consequences for musicians.

His account opens in the 1930s, with two patrician figures of great influence: John Hammond and his English acolyte, Leonard Feather. Negotiating a racially segregated world of thrill-seekers, jitterbugs, and the Communist party’s “popular fronts”, they fought for racial integration and jazz as an art, yet fell out over the authenticity of modern jazz. In the process they “discovered” Count Basie and Billie Holiday, recorded Bessie Smith and persuaded Benny Goodman to drop schmaltz.

The jousting continued through the 1950s. There was nothing that couldn’t be fought over: jazz style, philosophy and racial politics, cool versus soul jazz, art for art’s sake versus political commitment, European models of art versus African-American authenticity. But by the end of the decade there was a body of work to establish a jazz critic’s canon. But any shred of consensus was soon swept aside by the extraordinarily vindictive polemics of Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Frank Kofsky’s black nationalist separatism and their championing of free jazz.

After a detour to look at Ross Russell’s creation of Charlie Parker as an existential hero (it could have been worse: Albert Goldman, John Lennon’s biographer, asked Russell “if he had looked at the faggot angle”), Gennari reaches the present. Now the canonisation of jazz at New York’s Lincoln Center, and jazz’s relationship to rock and hip-hop, are the crux of discussions of race, authenticity and the direction of the music.

Yet as Gennari points out, the participants have much in common: an almost heroic love for a musical tradition that has absorbed nearly as much of their waking lives as the musicians who made it. Far from standing on the sidelines, the average jazz critic will probably have been, at one time or another, a producer, arranger, A&R man or musician. Many are directly responsible for at least making the mainstream aware of jazz, and making jazz education a major growth industry. Gennari’s narrative - at once taut and lavish in its proofs - shows how their apparently arcane wrangles pre-figured the discourse of much contemporary cultural criticism by decades.