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.

HARLEM NIGHTS: THE SECRET HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA'S JAZZ AGE

by Deirdre O'Connell

Reviewed by Richard King

The Australian, December 4, 2021

“As sure as guns is guns, if we let in coloured labour, they'll swallow us. They hate us. All the other colours hate the white. And they're only waiting till we haven't got the pull over them. They're only waiting. And then what about poor little Australia?" So yammers Jack Callcott in Kangaroo, D H Lawrence's fictionalised account of his three-month sojourn in NSW in the early 1920s. His interlocutor is Richard Somers, Lawrence's fictional alter ego, and the conversation is almost certainly based on ones the novelist had himself with anti-communist and white-nationalist elements at the fringes of political life in Sydney. The association did not end well...

THE INFLUENCE OF JOHN COLTRANE’S MUSIC ON IMPROVISING SAXOPHONISTS: Comparing selective improvisations of Coltrane, Jerry Bergonzi, and David Liebman

by Andrew Sugg

Reviewed by Ted Nettelbeck

October 1, 2022

Andrew Sugg is an Australian jazz saxophonist, composer, musicologist and educator, widely acknowledged to be one of the most outstanding of his generation. Although long based in Melbourne, from where he has established a strong national and international reputation, he was for several years during the 1990s resident in Adelaide, during which time he completed the PhD degree at the University of Adelaide (awarded 2002), from which this book derives…

EMPEROR NORTON’S HUNCH: The story of Lu Watters’ Yerba Buena Jazz Band

by John Buchanan

Reviewed by Larry L Quilligan

Allegheny Jazz Society, October, 1996

This is a book that this reviewer read from cover to cover in one sitting. Containing a total of 160 pages, that was not a feat of endurance. It was a thoroughly enjoyable return to the late 1930s, the 1940s and into the early 1950s when, to many jazz buffs and record collectors, "West Coast jazz" had an entirely different meaning than it has generally come to have these days. This well-researched work has investigated early California and Bay Area jazz history, which will delight many who have left their hearts in San Francisco…