Jazz St. LouisJazz St. Louis Book Club
Jazz St. Louis is proud to be able to continue its book club for the upcoming 2020-21 Jazz St. Louis season. This year’s club will focus on eight amazing books, ranging from histories and biographies to autobiographies and novels. Each book has been carefully selected by the book club’s facilitator, Dr. Gerald Early, Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters, Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies, Director of the Center for Humanities, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences at Washington University.
The rules are simple. The club is free and open to anyone willing to read the month’s book, show up, participate, and have a good time! Light refreshments will be provided at the conclusion of each book club meeting. While we encourage everyone to participate each month, there is no requirement that you commit to read each book and attend all the club meetings.
Questions can be emailed to [email protected].
The Books
While the books can be purchased anywhere, the official retail partner of the book club is Left Bank Books (LBB). The books will be offered at a 20% discount through LBB the month before and the month of the meeting, unless otherwise noted. All books can be purchased at their Central West End Location or on the LBB website.
The Cry of Jazz directed by Edward Bland
Discussion on January 12, 2020 at 7:00pm CST
Edward O. Bland’s dramatic filmmaking may be unusually crude, but his documentary-based insights into the art and politics of jazz—as seen in this short work of philosophical agitprop, from 1959—are profound. His film opens with a party at which white jazz enthusiasts ask questions about the music that their black friends answer. This framework gives way to the director’s essay-like narration, in which he defines jazz in terms of African-American experience; relates its form and sound—and the existential edge of black musicians’ performances—to politics; explains the music as a variety of oral history; and, remarkably, predicts both the aesthetic of free jazz and the music’s role in the civil-rights movement. Filmed performances of the Chicago-based visionary Sun Ra and his band (highlighting the great saxophonist John Gilmore) illustrate Bland’s theses and spark the director’s keenest visual engagement. Bland’s ideas are provocative and stimulating; the movie, which is as heartfelt as it is analytical, suggests a new dimension in music criticism. — The New Yorker
Available to watch for free via YouTube from the Library of Congress
Art: Why I Stuck with a Junkie Jazzman by Laurie Pepper
Discussion on February 9, 2021 at 7:00pm CST
Art Pepper told his sexy, sordid, and exciting true adventure stories to his lover, Laurie, who put them in a book. She quizzed him (and those who knew him) unrelentingly over seven years, editing and structuring a narrative to which she dedicated all her energy. Straight Life by Art and Laurie Pepper (Da Capo) was published in 1979. It was critical success and remains a classic of its kind, the subject of college literary and music studies. Laurie went on to marry Art and manage his resurgent career, touring the world with his band.
“Why I Stuck with a Junkie Jazzman” was the headline some editor gave a newspaper interview Laurie did while the band was in Australia in 1981, and she’s now stolen that “that perfect title” for her memoir. ART: Why I Stuck with a Junkie Jazzman (APMCorp), describes her marriage to the deeply troubled, drug-addicted, madly gifted artist. “That marriage was the making of me,” says Laurie. “Some people go to grad school or join the Marines. I married a genius who valued and inspired me and challenged me to use MY gifts. We had a difficult, powerful partnership. I had to tell that story.” She says she also needs to set the record straight and clarify her role: “People think I was some kind of little wifey-saint who rescued him. And Art encouraged them in that. But he knew how truly crazy I could be. We rescued each other.”
About the Author
Laurie Pepper was born in 1940 in Los Angeles to a family of radicals and artists. She grew up in New York and Los Angeles, attended U.C. Berkeley, and was photographer for the legendary L.A. Free Press during the 1960s but went astray and wound up in rehab where she met Art Pepper. Since Art’s death in 1982, she has continued to produce and promote his music. Her very small label, Widow’s Taste, has released a new album of previously unreleased Art Pepper performances every year since 2006.
Music: A Subversive History by Ted Gioia
Discussion on March 9, 2021 at 7:00pm CST
“A dauntingly ambitious, obsessively researched” (Los Angeles Times) global history of music that reveals how songs have shifted societies and sparked revolutions
Histories of music overwhelmingly suppress stories of the outsiders and rebels who created musical revolutions and instead celebrate the mainstream assimilators who borrowed innovations, diluted their impact, and disguised their sources. In Music: A Subversive History, Ted Gioia reclaims the story of music for the riffraff, insurgents, and provocateurs.
Gioia tells a four-thousand-year history of music as a global source of power, change, and upheaval. He shows how outcasts, immigrants, slaves, and others at the margins of society have repeatedly served as trailblazers of musical expression, reinventing our most cherished songs from ancient times all the way to the jazz, reggae, and hip-hop sounds of the current day.
Music: A Subversive History is essential reading for anyone interested in the meaning of music, from Sappho to the Sex Pistols to Spotify.
About the Author
Ted Gioia is a music historian and the author of eleven books, including How to Listen to Jazz. His three previous books on the social history of music-Work Songs, Healing Songs, and Love Songs-have each been honored with the ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award. Gioia’s wide-ranging activities as a critic, scholar, performer, and educator have established him as a leading global guide to music past, present, and future.
The selection for April 13, 2021 is to be determined.
Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s by Sherrie Tucker
Discussion on May 11, 2020 at 7:00pm CST
The forgotten history of the “all-girl” big bands of the World War II-era takes center stage in Sherrie Tucker’s Swing Shift. American demand for swing skyrocketed with the onslaught of war as millions-isolated from loved ones-sought diversion, comfort, and social contact through music and dance. Although all-female jazz and dance bands had existed since the 1920s, now hundreds of such groups, both African American and white, barnstormed ballrooms, theaters, dance halls, military installations, and makeshift USO stages on the home front and abroad.
Filled with firsthand accounts of more than a hundred women who performed during this era and complemented by thorough-and eye-opening-archival research, Swing Shift not only offers a history of this significant aspect of American society and culture but also examines how and why whole bands of dedicated and talented women musicians were dropped from-or never inducted into-our national memory. Tucker’s nuanced presentation reveals who these remarkable women were, where and when they began to play music, and how they navigated a sometimes wild and bumpy road-including their experiences with gas and rubber rationing, travel restrictions designed to prioritize transportation for military needs, and Jim Crow laws and other prejudices. She explains how the expanded opportunities brought by the war, along with suddenly increased publicity, created the illusion that all-female musicians-no matter how experienced or talented-were “Swing Shift Maisies,” 1940s slang for the substitutes for the “real” workers (or musicians) who were away in combat. Comparing the working conditions and public representations of women musicians with figures such as Rosie the Riveter, WACs, USO hostesses, pin-ups, and movie stars, Tucker chronicles the careers of such bands as the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Phil Spitalny’s Hours of Charm, The Darlings of Rhythm, and the Sharon Rogers All-Girl Band.
About the Author
Sherrie Tucker is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. A longtime jazz fan, she has conducted oral histories for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program, writes a column called “Jazzwomen Jam” for Jazz Now Magazine, and was formerly a jazz radio announcer in San Francisco.
