Jail to Carnegie Hall
Just Jazz. Edited by Sinclair Traill and the Hon.
and Jackson, 25s.) TEN essays by jazzmen and critics, with twenty- four plates and a 220-page critical discography of records cut in 1956. Of special interest and value because it discusses the British tributary as well as the transatlantic main-stream. Outstanding in the text are a tape-recording of Satchmo reminisc- ing in language as individual as his ideas; learned reviews on boogie-woogie and on blues, with the full lyric of the blues memorial to Emmett Till (lynched at Tallahatchie, Mississippi, 1955); an astringent, but fair, account of British jazz by Charles Wiluford and a piece of thumping invec- tive irony by Satchmo's English disciple, Humph, about highbrow critics who tell us his hero has 'gone commercial.' Bravo !
William Christopher Handy was born in Florence, Alabama, in 1875, of a long line of Methodist ministers. He toured the southern States as a young man with the Mahara Minstrels, listen- ing to his people's singing, and later himself wrote tunes which every vocalist and instrumentalist of note has since sung, played, and often massacred, among them the immortal 'Memphis Blues,"St. , . Louis Blues' and arrangements of forgotten spirituals. This is a homespun, fascinating account of the era in which a living, splendid folk-song style progressed from jails and fields and railroads to the Library of Congress and the Carnegie Hall. Whether this progress was upwards or downwards, the reader will decide for himself.
COLIN MACINNES
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