Patrick Burke . Come In and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street . Chicago : University of Chicago Press . 2008 . Pp. xiii, 314. $35.00.

Abstract

Beginning in the late 1930s, publicists and writers proclaimed the 52nd Street block to the west of Fifth Avenue to be “Swing Street,” the jazz capital of New York City. Only steps apart, the Famous Door, the Onyx Club, Kelly's Stable, Jimmy Ryan's, the Three Deuces, and many other nightclubs brought celebrated musicians together almost every night. Historians of jazz have explored in general terms how the music came to inhabit a unique arena of American cultural expressiveness and race relations, and now Patrick Burke's excellent study investigates the particular historical significance of jazz's best-known (and now eradicated) address. Focusing on the street's most vital decades, the 1930s and 1940s, Burke characterizes its musical venues as tablets on which were written important vignettes of cultural change and controversy. 52nd Street had been an elite residential block, one replete with brownstones, until the expansion of midtown nightlife in the 1920s (assisted by a sympathetic municipal zoning board) drove out wealthy families. It is perhaps unfortunate that Burke does not explore this “prehistory,” as it would help to set the stage for the ambivalence in later years of white musicians and audience members toward nonwhites and the working classes. In the 1930s the brownstones offered intimate sites for dining, drinking, and listening, and as its fame as a jazz center grew, 52nd Street helped to move '30s swing away from its reputation as a music that mainly resounded in large dance halls.