[Marxism] Leon Botstein

["Paul Flewers" <rfls12802@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

List members who like jazz will be interested in a forthcoming book by Mike
Gerber called Jazz Jews, which, as the title suggests, is about the Jewish
presence in jazz music. Researched over a long period, he interviewed many
jazz musicians, including the veteran Artie Shaw. It looks at the USA, of
course, and other countries, including Britain, South Africa, Israel, and
also at the experience of Jewish jazzers in the Third Reich and the Soviet
bloc. It will be available soon from Five Leaves Publications of Nottingham
< http://www.fiveleaves.co.uk/ >, who recently republished Bill Fishman's
excellent East End Jewish Radicals.

I have looked at the British modern jazz scene as it evolved after the
Second World War, and an interesting sociological detail is that it was
disproportionately West Indian, Scottish and Jewish. Looking at the Jewish
contingent, there were around half a million Jews in Britain at the time,
one per cent of the population of the country, yet probably a quarter of
modern jazzers were Jewish. (One of them, the talented Victor Feldman, later
enjoyed a successful career in the USA, including with Miles Davis, who was
very complimentary about him in his autobiography.) Why this was so I don't
know, friends of mine in the Jewish Socialist Group are at a loss to explain
why when I asked them. The Jewish presence in the much bigger traditional
jazz scene at the time was minimal (although there seems to have been a
disproportionate number of Scotsmen in that scene as well). It will be
interesting to see if Gerber's book looks at this puzzle.

Paul F



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