My Fifth Book -Jazz Historiography - the Story of Jazz History Writing

The appearance of something called jass or jazz around 1915 caused a flurry of commentary in the press and musical journals seeking to define the music and explain its roots. In 1917 Herbert Osgood wrote the first history of Jazz.

Throughout the period of research and publication that led to the publication of my four works on early jazz history I was frequently confronted with the inadequacy of many accounts of jazz history and their distorting influence on perceptions of jazz during some 100 years of its existence. In the last chapter of The Birth of Jazz: Reviving the Music of the Bolden Era I expressed concern that there appeared to be a lack of interest among jazz historian critics in jazz historiography and its limitations, and noted that a number of recent writers had expressed similar sentiments. I was prompted to investigate why this was so.

A brief exposure to much of what has been written reveals deep divisions among jazz historians about the course of jazz history and even the nature of jazz itself. It is this tangled web of controversies that has formed our popular appreciation of jazz history. Untangling this web and identifying the threads that made up its conventional history is the business of Jazz Historiography - the history of writing jazz history.

My attempts to untangle this story led to the publication of Jazz Historiography: The Story of Jazz History Writing in 2013.

It is available at internet sites like Amazon. com in eBook and print formats