Review: Patrick Burke, Come in and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008 (hbk). xiv + 314pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-226-08071-0

Abstract

Patrick Burke, Come in and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008 (hbk). xiv + 314pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-226-08071-0.Ever since Philip Bohlman and Ronald Radano published their groundbreaking collection of essays, Music and the Racial Imagination, there has been a steady stream of studies exploring and extending the questions it raised about how musical practice relates to racial categories and racist discourse. Patrick Burke's study of the racial politics of jazz on 52nd Street in New York City explicitly takes its cue from this research. Beginning in the 1930s, when the famous Onyx Club emerged as a kind of unofficial 'workingmen's club' for studio musicians, and following the rise of 52nd Street as a major commercial centre in the 1940s, Burke develops a subtle and detailed analysis of the racial dynamics of jazz production and reception. His focus is on 'the mutual influence between musical style and racial representation' (p. 5) as these took shape within and around the area of 52nd Street.Clubs such as the Onyx, the Spotlight, the Three Deuces, Jimmy Ryan's and many others are etched into jazz mythology, not the least by William Gottlieb's famous photograph of 52nd Street, which he took in July 1948. The neon signs above the clubs proclaim the myth as powerfully as do the many stories and images we have of what was going on inside. They announced to musicians and audiences alike not only the growing popularity of jazz, but also the new conception of jazz performance that was taking shape there, encapsulated in the after-hours jam sessions and small-group swing bands. The regular appearance of performers such as Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, Art Tatum and Dizzy Gillespie in the clubs, along with the musicians' emphasis on spontaneity and virtuosity as essential features, reinforces the claim that it was there, on 52nd Street, that jazz underwent a transformation from popular entertainment into a modernist art form, a change that was mirrored in the stylistic movement from swing to bebop.Broadly speaking, Come in and Hear the Truth is about the problem of conceptualizing this transformation. Most accounts of jazz history explain key moments of change in terms of a succession of styles, usually embodied in the work of a 'canon' of great (sometimes even heroic) performers and composers and measured against a set of core musical conventions. Taken together, these conventions form what is meant when performers and critics refer to the 'jazz tradition'. The transition from one style to the next involves artists in a thorough-going revision of this tradition, mostly by reconstituting those conventions that have become worn out, cliched or no longer meaningful. The really great players or composers are those individuals who are able to do this, to reinvent the music's language and gestures without destroying jazz in the process. An exemplary text in this regard is Martin Williams's The Jazz Tradition, in which the shift from swing to bebop is understood in terms of the individuals who made it possible. In Williams's study, 52nd Street exists only as a colourful backdrop to a story that is ostensibly about the individual artist's capacity to transform the musical materials they find in the work of their predecessors and, thus, to find new ways of rediscovering and, ultimately, overcoming the essential problems the jazz tradition presents them with.By focusing our attention on 52nd Street-'the street that never slept', in Arnold Shaw's famous phrase-Burke moves the question of change in an entirely different direction. Jazz styles appear in conjunction with each other, jostling for attention, their identity emerging from a complex cross-fertilization of ideas and methods, personnel and practices, rather than as successive stages of an evolutionary movement. Individual performers certainly shape what is happening, but not independently of the groups and clubs and recording studios within which they lived and worked. …