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Reviews 445 otherwise never have left their southern homes. And at the other end of this literal spectrum, the war had sharpened African American resentments about the disjunc- tion between ‘service’ given for their country overseas and ‘service’ received back home. The assertive blackness of bop amplified, but was not the sole source of, the sense that 52nd Street belonged to them. This is only one example of the macro-forces shaping the dynamic of this micro-Street. The style wars are discussed with sharp and well-sourced definition, but as a kind of local feud over some stylistic turf which also plays out local sociometrics about race, generation, authenticity. But these ‘style’ wars were part of a far more internationalised encounter that reverberated with the rise of totalitari- anism, with Fordist standardisation and later with the politics of the Cold War. Sometimes as the author pores over the details of why 52nd Street developed the way it did I felt like shouting, like a kid in a movie, ‘Watch out, behind you – at the window!’ This leads us back, however, to what is most engaging about the book, which I paid the great compliment of reading through at one sitting. Its appeal lies not just in the subject, but in the author’s deep immersion in it. For anyone with an interest in the history of this decisive genre in modern music, 52nd Street is a riveting subject. The discourses which permeated its history also ripple out into studies of all popular music, and in untangling those discourses, Burke provides models that have much broader applicability. But it is 52nd Street that the author places at centre stage, and in so doing he also helps to rescue a number of now largely forgotten musicians from the wings of jazz history. Bruce Johnson Universities of Macquarie, Australia; Turku, Finland; Glasgow, UK Delightfulee: The Life and Music of Lee Morgan.ByJeff McMillan. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. 272 pp. ISBN 978-0-472-11502-0 (cloth); ISBN 978-0-472-03281-5 9 (pb) doi:10.1017/S0261143009990237 I started reading this book as I was writing up some research into how jazz histories are mediated, and so these issues were uppermost in my mind as I thought through my review. McMillan’s book is part of Lewis Porter’s prestigious Jazz Perspectives series, which mainly covers accounts of key jazz musicians who have not always been the subject of book-length analyses. The series, and this book, is part of a substantial body of jazz scholarship, and an increasing seriousness about trying to understand individ- ual musicians and their playing styles within the wider context of a cultural history of jazz. It is possible to see this book, then, as part of a paradigm of established jazz studies, and so reflections on this study of jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan can, to some extent, raise questions about the historiography of jazz as a whole. Lee Morgan’s music is perhaps most widely known through the 1963 recording ‘Sidewinder’ (named after the North American snake, rather than the US airborne missile), and possibly his iconic status as a Blue Note recording artist. The ‘Sidewinder’ recording, released as a single, was a jukebox hit in the US, and both 7 inch and LP versions appeared in the Billboard pop and R&B sales charts. I grasped something of the aural power that this recording must have had in early 1960s African American bars, because this was one of the first Blue Note records I heard, Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 27 Sep 2021 at 03:07:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143009990237 446 Reviews just over ten years later when it arrested my attention on the sound system of a record shop. I bought a copy of the then hard-to-find LP re-release, and that started a Blue Note fixation I have never really grown out of. Today, the track is a staple of compilations of the Blue Note label, and its hard bop sound stands for many as the archetypal Blue Note sound. McMillan’s book gives a whole chapter to the pivotal importance of the recording for Morgan, and later chapters pick up much of the influence of the recording on the trumpeter’s later career. It is notable, though, that the author picked another, less widely known, Morgan LP to name the book. I surmise that this title is meant to indicate something of Morgan’s compositional style, because the author emphasises this part of his subject’s life throughout. Like most jazz (and musician) biographies, the book takes a chronological approach, with chapters for key periods of the trumpeter’s life, which included a notable role in Art Blakey’s Jazz messengers, a role in Dizzy Gillespie’s last big band, and his own albums for Blue Note as leader and sideman. In addition, and in line with the book’s sub-title The Life and Music of . ., there are also chapters which reflect the musician’s personal life, including his problem with drugs and his untimely death at the hands of his jealous lover. The book is exceptionally well written, and one need not share my obsessive interest in this period of music to find it stimulating and informative. It certainly does an excellent job of laying out the political and social world in which Morgan made his music, and something of the economics of the record and music events industry within which he performed. For those interested in the detail, there is also much to value. I could not, however, find the promised full online Morgan discography at the publisher website. This is the first book-length analysis of Morgan, the emphasis on his compositional contribu- tions is important, and through some primary analysis the author brings many details of the musician’s life to the public domain. These qualities are not surprising when one learns that McMillan is a graduate of the Rutgers-Newark University masters degree in Jazz History and Research. Reflecting on my experience of reading the book, though, other wider issues come to mind. I do not offer these as criticisms because, as I have indicated, this is an exemplary instance in an established field of jazz biography. Rather, I think we need to ask what version of jazz does a book like this produce, and what does that imply about how we write about jazz, or any other popular music history? Well, it places Morgan at a key moment of a developing jazz, and thus constructs jazz as a progressive form moving from Gillespie’s bop innovations, through an African American soul jazz, and on to an experimental free music. It identifies Morgan, and in some sense all jazz musicians, as a virtuoso, an artist, and an accomplished composer. The discussion of ‘The Sidewinder’, and the attempts by the record company to repeat its success, reveal something of the tensions between the discourses of art and commerce that are at the centre of jazz culture. However, like all the social, economic and political factors that the book deals with, these matters are the backcloth on which Morgan’s life is accounted. In essence, I think I am suggesting that ‘jazz’ is an unproblematic idea which lies at the heart of the story that is told here, rather than something that was being made and remade by Morgan and his contemporaries. In the end this is a realist story of one musician in a taken-for-granted cultural context. Exactly how one re-engages with research and history as story telling without losing the virtues of a book like this is a difficult question to answer. Jazz scholars, and popular music scholars interested in jazz, will find considerable value in this Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 27 Sep 2021 at 03:07:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143009990237 Reviews 447 account of one musician. Fans of Morgan’s music will be delighted by the detail and clarity of the account. Those seeking to understand jazz as a more complex field of popular culture will find lots of material and ideas to work with, but not a clear model of how to interrogate exactly what jazz is. Tim Wall Birmingham City University, UK Discography Lee Morgan, The Sidewinder. Blue Note. 1963 Various, The Best Blue Note Album in the World Ever. Blue Note. 1999 78 Blues: Folksongs and Phonographs in the American South.ByJohn Minton. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. 288 pp. ISBN 978-1-934110-19-5 doi:10.1017/S0261143009990249 For this study Minton examined several hundred 78 r.p.m. phonograph discs, originally segregated as ‘hillbilly’ and ‘race’ records, released between the mid-1920s and World War II, mostly referencing LP and CD reissues of the latter. Minton asks how early-twentieth-century southerners in the USA experienced these records and suggests that they regarded them as folksong performances and familiar social occasions, thus extending a pre-phonograph tradition. This observation depends on the ‘listening instructions’ that many of these records actually contain: notably direct appeals to the audience or more subtle cues, ‘Suggesting a coherent aesthetic for experiencing [these] records’ (p. 35). That the goal of the book is to hear, ‘All of these recorded events as they once sounded’ (p.

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