Review of Patrick Burke. 2008. Come In And Hear The Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

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In today's Manhattan, the street signs on Fifty-second Street between Fifth and Seventh Avenues tell passersby that they are on Swing Street;' even though nothing about the towering skyscrapers and the moving mass of people in business suits reflect this locale. Instead, what the street signs point to is a Fifty-second Street of the past: a collection of nightclubs and other establishments that jazz critics and scholars have designated as the birthplace of bebop, one of jazz's paradigm-shifting genres. In Come In And Hear The Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street, Patrick Burke argues that while this designation may be true, historical accounts of this particular time and place tend to overlook nuanced narratives of racial identity, gender identity, racial mixing, cosmopolitan nightlife, the music business, artistic integrity, moral­ ity and vice, the enduring debate over jazz, and the path in which the music would continue to develop-closer to its roots in Dixieland and early Chicago-style jazz or in the modern bebop. Burke seeks to uncover this hidden history by taking a concentrated look at the musicians active on Fifty-second Street between 1930 and 1944. As the book's subtitle suggests, the neon signs that filled the night sky on Fifty-second Street illuminated a bevy of after-hour establishments that fashioned themselves-some more overtly than others-as hotbeds of authentic jazz. Burke's main goal is to deconstruct this discourse of jazz authenticity by explaining that what appears to have simply been a dispute over the merits of musical styles was also one about black and white masculinity and racial identity, and how these formations were played out in the music. This study is especially important because of its in-depth look at what was, by all accounts, an ephemeral moment in jazz history that resonates into the present. Much of how we understand jazz today comes from what was happening in the dark, smoky, cramped clubs of Fifty-second Street (including the image of a dark, smoky, cramped jazz club), and Burke rightly and successfully gives these clubs and their culture a closer, more thorough inspection. Throughout his study, Burke makes it clear that the discourse sur­ rounding jazz authenticity on Fifty-second Street always involved notions of race, which ultimately influenced the actions of club owners, audiences, and musicians. It might be of no surprise to the current-day reader that race was a determining factor in which acts would play in the 1930s and Current Musicology, No. 89 (Spring 2010) © 2010 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York