BOOK REviewS
This section includes reviews of books on jazz subjects by a number of writers. Reviewers interested in contributing are welcome to contact the editor by filling out the form in the CONTACT tab. When contributing please include the title of the book and its author, the name of the publisher, the date of publication, the book’s ISBN number, and the number of pages in the book. Please also provide, if possible, a high resolution scan of the book’s cover. Readers can click on the INDEX button for a list of reviews in this folder.
MASTERS, MONGRELS AND MADNESS: RECOLLECTIONS AND OBSERVATIONS ON ART MUSIC IN AUSTRALIA
by Tony Gould
Reviewed by Eric Myers
The Australian, April 7, 2018
It’s unusual for a leading Australian jazz musician to write a book. Tony Gould’s Masters, Mongrels and Madness, a collection of essays with some fascinating autobiographical content, will be pored over by people in the jazz community...
THE AUSTRALIAN JAZZ EXPLOSION
by Mike Williams. Photographs by Jane March
Reviewed by Eric Myers
Encore Magazine, October, 1981
The publication of Mike Williams’ long awaited book is a significant event for Australian jazz. With Dick Hughes’ autobiography Daddy’s Practising Again, Andrew Bisset’s history Black Roots White Flowers, and Norm Linehan’s Australian Jazz Picture Book we are now accumulating an impressive literature on the art form in this country...
PLAYING AD LIB: IMPROVISATORY MUSIC IN AUSTRALIA 1836-1970
by John Whiteoak
Reviewed by Bruce Johnson
JazzChord, Apr/May, 1999
John Whiteoak is both a practitioner and scholar of popular music, and brings to bear a breadth of sympathy and expertise that has made him one of the most important Australian researchers in recent developments in the study of music in Australia, in particular, shifting music scholarship away from a modernist preoccupation with the linkage between music and composer/text, to the study of its linkages with performance/context. This interest naturally drew him to the study of improvisational practices…