Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics Review

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(More customer reviews)Thelonius Monk once said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. If you nevertheless enjoy reading about jazz as much as listening to it, this is a great read. On the other hand, if you think jazz critics are a bunch of navel-gazing wannabes who use music as a platform to expound their pet social or political views, you may yet find this book interesting. It's not a breezy book by any means, but Gennari succeeds in not getting caught up in academic discourse-speak. "Liminal" appears only once, books and magazines aren't "texts," and they're read, not "interrogated." Whew!
Gennari starts with Leonard Feather and John Hammond, two critics with serious conflict of interest issues, both from a business perspective and from the standpoint of their strong social beliefs. Feather largely overcame his, while Hammond gave in to his temptation to judge a record by whether its label allowed unions in its pressing plants. Genneri spends much of his book focusing on the post WWII critics: Martin Williams, Nat Hentoff, Ralph Gleason, Gene Lees, Whitney Balliett and Marshall Sterns. He devotes a chapter to the radicals Amiri Baraka and Frank Kofsky and closes out with the new kids, Stanley Crouch, Gary Giddins and Albert Murray. There are some odd digressions: the cult of the (mostly British) record collectors; the Newport Jazz festival; Dial records producer and author Ross Russell's posthumous obsession with Charlie Parker.
There is something of a leftward slant. While the radical leftists such as Baraka and Kofsky are dismissed when they eventually wander away from music criticism for pure politics, Baraka is taken seriously for his work up to about 1964-65. On the other hand, hard conservatives such as Richard Sudhalter and James Lincoln Collier simply get the back of the hand. Gennari doesn't wear his politics on his sleeve, however; up to the last chapter you really have to read between the lines to get a sense of his drift. There is, however, a blast near the end when he slams the conservatives for their assertion that jazz historians have inflated the role of black musicians and ignored whites.
As I said above, this is a fascinating book for anyone who enjoys reading about jazz and an indispensable item for those interested in the history of jazz literature.


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In the illustrious and richly documented history of American jazz, no figure has been more controversial than the jazz critic. Jazz critics can be revered or reviled—often both—but they should not be ignored. And while the tradition of jazz has been covered from seemingly every angle, nobody has ever turned the pen back on itself to chronicle the many writers who have helped define how we listen to and how we understand jazz. That is, of course, until now.In Blowin' Hot and Cool, John Gennari provides a definitive history of jazz criticism from the 1920s to the present. The music itself is prominent in his account, as are the musicians—from Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington to Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Roscoe Mitchell, and beyond. But the work takes its shape from fascinating stories of the tradition's key critics—Leonard Feather, Martin Williams, Whitney Balliett, Dan Morgenstern, Gary Giddins, and Stanley Crouch, among many others. Gennari is the first to show the many ways these critics have mediated the relationship between the musicians and the audience—not merely as writers, but in many cases as producers, broadcasters, concert organizers, and public intellectuals as well.For Gennari, the jazz tradition is not so much a collection of recordings and performances as it is a rancorous debate—the dissonant noise clamoring in response to the sounds of jazz. Against the backdrop of racial strife, class and gender issues, war, and protest that has defined the past seventy-five years in America, Blowin' Hot and Cool brings to the fore jazz's most vital critics and the role they have played not only in defining the history of jazz but also in shaping jazz's significance in American culture and life.

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