100 Books Like Swing Shift

In this utterly unique book, Small contends that music does not consist of “works” but is rather an activity called “musicking” that enacts relationships – between sounds but also among the participants, including the audience. Through musicking we learn about ourselves in relationship to others, and that relationship can be one of submission (sitting quietly listening to an orchestra) or equality (jazz musicians improvising in response to each other while the audience shouts encouragement). In Small’s view, African American music enacts democratic relationships, in which all participate as equals, and individuality is enhanced rather than hindered by group solidarity.  

Based on extensive personal interviews with some of the most impactful musicians in jazz, Dr. Monson demonstrates how the supremely interactive nature of jazz improvisation is based on the oral and aural traditions of African American vernacular speech. It therefore demonstrates the way that music, language, and other aspects of culture intrinsically form a unified complex whole.

Gilroy sees in black music a democratic “ethos” embodied in features like “call and response” and improvisation. This ethical sensibility unites disparate parts of the African diaspora, but Gilroy also insists that the music is irrevocably “hybrid” and “Creole,” connecting African-derived cultures with European and other ones as well. Gilroy argues that black music’s connective ability creates an intersubjective, democratic community which he calls an “alternative public sphere.”

Although not about jazz or even music, this rich text provides a foundation for thinking about jazz democratically and has influenced some of the above-mentioned authors. Bakhtin argues that artworks have the potential to put multiple voices in conversation with one another without resolving them to a single point of view. The epitome of such artworks was what he called, using a musical metaphor, the “polyphonic novel” pioneered by Dostoevsky. Such artworks embody and encourage a “broadening of consciousness,” an openness to the voices of others that is the essence of democracy at its best.  

Mingus reveals a life so foreign to my own upbringing—uninhibited, dangerous, angry, crude, at once vulnerable and invulnerable—that I was shocked by this book as a teenage jazz head.

I found his autobiography intimidating, much the way his music shoved me out of my comfort zone. In Mingus’s prose, there is no mistaking the cadences, dissonance, and strange beauty that characterize his formidable body of musical work.

I’ve never bought into the trope that one has to suffer for one’s art but I believed Mingus when he said, “I'm trying to play the truth of what I am."

Want to write about music and musicians? You’ll need to understand the world in which they live. And if you’re writing about jazz and rock ‘n’ roll in the middle of the last century, that means a segregated, ugly world where even the most talented were treated as less than human. This was the world of the Chitlin’ Circuit. A dangerous, exciting, lawless network of nightclubs and juke joints from Memphis to New Orleans, Houston to Indianapolis, this topography spawned the popular music we love today. And nobody brings it to life like Lauterbach, whose reporting and language are as intense and musical as the era itself.

This was my ‘go to’ book for years when I first began to write about music and jazz music in particular.

Cooke explains many things that until then, I had only heard about. The history of jazz music is explained clearly. From Be-bop and hard bop to free jazz and the avante garde. His writing allowed me to put names to music styles I found fascinating and it was as if an author was truly speaking my language. He introduces some well-known jazz musicians and their impact on jazz music 

I came across this book when I decided to focus my graduate study on the history of jazz and was reading everything I could find. It’s a short book, full of incredible vintage photographs, and it taught me so much about what swing is, how music and dance are joined at the hip. How it’s all rooted in the blues. And about the link between the “Saturday Night Function” of celebrating life with music and dance, followed a few hours later by the “Sunday Morning Function,” singing and celebrating God and community in church. The two are not all that far apart. Along with Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray was probably the first author to write about jazz with a real sense of lyricism and poetry. In this book, the writing itself carries the energy and exuberance of jazz.

This jive-tongued jazz cat really knows how to use language! His use of slang is evidenced by the ten-page glossary at the end of the book. Raw and gritty, Mezzrow’s memoir describes how he learned to play jazz and blues in a juvenile reformatory, where he developed his love for the Black “race” and its culture. He often riffs on race. In 1920s Chicago he rubbed elbows with Black and White jazz luminaries, plus gangsters, prostitutes, and drug dealers. During a side trip to Paris, France, he spread the gospel of jazz to Europe. In the 30s he lived in New York City’s Harlem, inhabiting a milieu similar to that in Chicago, peddling marijuana to jazz greats and others. His extraordinary writing inspired Jack Kerouac and the Beat writers.

Crouch (1945-2020) was many things: jazz drummer, poet, philosopher, novelist, biographer, critic. In that last role he was, as the publisher’s notes to this indispensable book of essays on jazz and related matters puts it, “the perennial bull in the china shop of African-American intelligentsia.” Crouch relished controversy — he hated fusion, the popular blend of jazz and rock that came along in the 1970s; he abhorred rap; he even had unkind words to say about Toni Morrison’s Beloved. He was passionately contrarian on racial matters, refusing to hew to any politically correct line. He detested simplistic thinking in any form. Calling Bird, Clint Eastwood’s widely praised 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker “very bad,” Crouch wrote of the “stack of glowing reviews… that reveal the extent to which many who would be sympathetic to Negroes are prone to an unintentional, liberal racism. That racism reduces the complexities of… show more.