Riffs and Choruses: A New Jazz Anthology. (Diverse Topics).

Riffs and Choruses: A New Jazz Anthology. Edited by Andrew Clark. New York: Continuum, 2001. [xvi, 486 p. ISBN 0-8264-4756-2. $29.95.]

In this marvelous anthology, Andrew Clark uses the jazz terms "riffs" (musical ideas) and "choruses" (repetitions of the song form) to structure his selections. He draws on a variety of primary, historical, critical, and literary sources to introduce and connect the elements of this complex and quintessentially American art form. Clark's fundamental goal is to explore the relationship of jazz to its context: history, politics, culture, sociolinguistics, business, and aesthetics. This anthology is one of several recent works using this methodology for the study of jazz. Like Robert O'Meally's The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) and Alyn Shipton's A New History of Jazz (London and New York: Continuum, 2001), the emphasis in Riffs and Choruses is on exploring interconnections and synergies rather than revisiting jazz chronology.

The volume is divided into ten sections, each of which explores a major set of ideas, forms, and issues in jazz through carefully selected period and recent sources. The subjects range from the definition and origins of the art form, through its history, nature, context, musicology, racial issues, mythos, lifestyle, language, literature, media, and stereotypes. Intended for classroom and reference use, it contains extensive suggested readings, a bibliography, and name and film indexes. Of particular value for researchers are hard-to-find primary source material and excerpts from important scholarship in related disciplines.

Riff 1 explores the origins and definitions of jazz with selections highlighting public reaction to the emergence of a new musical form. The discussion of the etymology of the word "jazz" is particularly useful for the library to fulfill the perennial hope of undergraduates writing papers and middle-school children doing history projects for a definitive, short, and easy meaning. Clark provides an entire section of sources claiming to establish the origins and uses of the word, but there is no agreement among them. Clark wryly comments, "Etymologically, derivation of the word "jass" or "jazz" has invited much fruitless conjecture" (p. 15).

Of great interest are primary materials from the early years of jazz. Ferdinand "jelly Roll" Morton's 1938 claim, originally published in Downbeat, that he invented jazz in 1902 is outrageous and illuminating (p. 27-30). Morton's piece is only half the story, but W. C. Handy's angry response, a telling commentary on Morton's reputation among contemporaries, is not included. There are also visceral reactions to this new, "savage," threatening music. Anne Shaw Faulker's classic Ladies Home Journal opus, "Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?" describes the National Dancing Masters Association ban on "vulgar cheap jazz music" on the grounds of its "evil influence" and "bolshevism" (p. 38-40). Clive Bell writes about jazz for the New Republic in such demeaning and racist language that the reader is left gasping (p. 40-42).

That early jazz was so feared that it was reviled in the popular ...