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When Genres Collide: Down Beat, Rolling Stone, and the Struggle between Jazz and Rock. By Matt Brennan.

2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 98; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ml/gcx105

1477-4631

Justin A. Williams,

Music History and Culture

In his new book, Matt Brennan seeks to investigate two puzzles of popular-music history: first, to investigate why jazz and rock scholarship are so segregated if not resistant to one another; and secondly, why jazz and rock have been treated differently in the press despite their shared characteristics. In many ways, the first question is answered through a thorough investigation of the second, as Brennan focuses primarily on jazz and rock criticism history through the lens of the periodicals Down Beat and Rolling Stone. The contents are more comprehensive than the title suggests. The book covers not only occasions when the two genres collide, but also the origins of jazz criticism and the founding of Down Beat in 1934, one year before Benny Goodman’s rise to stardom. Each chapter could be read on its own, though they speak to each other by painting a picture of jazz and rock’s separate rise to legitimization in an almost symbiotic relationship, where one genre defines itself in opposition to the other. The first chapter maps the rise of jazz culture as a precursor to rock’n’roll, while the second chapter outlines the dismissal of rock’n’roll in Down Beat. Chapter 3 looks at how the existing jazz press covered rock’s emergence. Chapter 4, which could be seen as the cultural response to chapter 3, covers the emergence of rock critics and others who founded publications such as Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy! in order to discuss the music in the way they wanted. Chapter 5 focuses on the press at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1969, very much an experiment in booking rock, funk, and jazz acts all together, which led to crowd disturbances. Newport’s reception becomes another avenue by which to discuss various assumptions about these genres and the journalistic discourses surrounding them.