Rating: Excellent
When you really fall for jazz, as I did some twenty five years ago, you soon realise that it contains endless multitudes of musicians who made a massive amount of incredible music. The only way to attempt to take it all in is to become a dedicated Jazzbo for whom loving jazz is a way of life. Recently a fellow Jazzbo leant me this superb coffee-table book. It does exactly what it says on the cover, and more. The book includes quality text detailing some of the prime movers during this incredible period in culture, from musicians to those who started up now obscure record labels. The American civil rights era inspired a great deal of wild and important jazz music. Reading through this fascinating book it occurred to me that jazz got there first in terms of the creation of indie do it yourself record labels well before the indie label explosion that began in the late nineteen seventies during the punk and post-punk era. A little while after I happened to read the back blurb and it said exactly that! If you love jazz then this book is essential in that it alerts you to an even deeper layer of jazz, most of which I've never seen nor heard of. There's some of the acts you'd expect, like Sun Ra and Don Cherry, but then there's the likes of Idris Ackamoor, Roy Meriwether and The La Mont Zeno Theatre, among many obscure jazz acts.
The book's main thrust is the album art and the reproductions of album cover art is just superb. Here's some examples below:
Many of these I've never seen second hand or as new re-releases. As yet I haven't searched for any of them online, god knows how much original pressings would cost. I'm thinking I'm going to stick to the book for now and hope that during this re-release era many will emerge over the years.
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