Despite its academic credentials – author Mike Smith is assistant professor of practice at Ohio State University, the publisher the University Press of Mississippi – this informative and argumentative book is, more generally, as the subtitle says, a popular summary of popular jazz in 1960s black America. Its coherent argument is that this popular jazz music is often ignored by the jazz community, notably the critics, and is worthy of study and enjoyment in its own right. Guiding him through this argument, Smith consistently stresses the importance of the pleasure principle in jazz, that just because a song or style of jazz is successful, that does not make it less important.
Smith makes that point very well in his opening two chapters, where he focuses on Nancy Wilson and then Eddie Harris. Wilson recorded more than 70 albums, 35 of them for Capital Records, for which she was the second-biggest selling artist after the Beatles in the United States. She recorded with jazz trios, big bands and orchestras, and sung soul and pop as well as jazz. Yet she appears in almost none of the histories of jazz, and her Grove entry is minimal. Likewise, Eddie Harris, whose debut album Exodus To Jazz featured an adaption of the title theme to the Exodus film which, as a single, achieved massive success and a Billboard Top 100 chart ranking. Again, now largely ignored and forgotten. Critic Stanley Crouch, predictably, promoted this stigma regarding jazz and popularity, and was constantly on the prowl against sell-outs, criticising Miles Davis for turning “butt to the beautiful in order to genuflect before the commercial”. As Smith notes, “There is reluctance to even recognize jazz albums with big record sales as jazz albums.” Just because a jazz song is successful, can it still be considered jazz?
Along the way, Smith makes his case well, introducing in support of his argument such luminaries as Jimmy Smith, Nina Simone, Lee Morgan and The Sidewinder, Erroll Garner, Herbie Hancock and, above all, Ramsey Lewis, whose song gives this book its title. Lewis sums up the situation perfectly: “The average guy, and his wife, they come home from working all day, they don’t want to be educated. They want to be entertained.” Listening to The In Crowd, such people “got it,” they got the popularity of Ramsey Lewis and needed no critical apparatus or acknowledgement to do so. In laying down this argument, Smith detours entertainingly through the development of individual record labels and their varying styles, and, most informatively, the role played by black culture in promoting jazz: think Jimmy Smith and the Home Cookin’ album for black culinary proof, think, too, of the numerous jazz albums featuring the popular soul idiom in their titles, and the gradual and belated use of black women, not white models, on album covers.
In a book like this, there are inevitably some editorial glitches, errors of fact, and clumsy sentences that a good editor should have straightened out. Entertainingly, the automatic spellcheck has twice termed the black music scholar Albert Murray “imminent,” when prominent is probably meant. And pacificist Martin Luther King should never, ever, be described as a “drum major for peace”. But such mistakes are wonderfully and totally offset by the printing here of King’s foreword to the festival programme of the inaugural 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival, words I – and I suspect many others – have never read before. In five brief paragraphs and a single sentence, King sets out his credo, that God endowed his creatures with the capacity to create, that jazz speaks for life, and the blues tell the story of life’s difficulties. “This is triumphant music … long before the modern essayists and schools wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring in their souls.” Smith’s case for popular jazz is confirmed.
***
In With The In Crowd: Popular Jazz In 1960s Black America by Mike Smith. 228 pp, 34 b/w photos, popular jazz listening guide, bibliography. University Press of Mississippi. US $30, ISBN 978-1-4968-5115-4
