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The Evoluton of Jazz in Britain

By Catherine Parsonage

(Ashgate, 320pp., £50)

As a glance at its thirty pages of Appendices (listing songs consulted, the plot of a revue, a lengthy bibliography) might suggest, The Evolution of Jazz in Britain by Catherine Parsonage (Ashgate, 320pp., £50) is based on a great deal of meticulous, painstaking research.

The beginnings of minstrelsy, the availability and subject matter of sheet music dealing with jazz and ragtime, the beginnings of jazz criticism, the popular reaction to touring revues and visits from the likes of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, the social milieu in which jazz was played: all these subjects have been scrupulously examined by Catherine Parsonage in this extraordinarily thorough study of how an apparently 'alien' art form established itself in Britain.

This minute attention to detail is clearly the book's great strength, given that future reasearchers will have many reasons to bless Ms Parsonage for doing much of their spadework for them; for the general, non-academic reader, however, it is also its greatest weakness.

As a thesis, where 'working' must be shown to gain marks, it succeeds triumphantly; as a book in the marketplace, it is somewhat forbidding, its wood (an overall argument derived from all these details) often obscured by the trees (aforementioned details).

This said, as a book containing every piece of hard information likely to be required for an understanding of its subject, it is unlikely to be surpassed in the foreseeable future; it is, however, a bit of a pity that it does not appear to have undergone a professional editing process, containing as it does numerous misspellings (of words such as 'Portuguese' and 'analyse'), and a number of solecisms, grammatical errors and presentation problems (single quotes within single quotes, inconsistent methods of bibliographical citation etc. etc.). Overall, though, a valuable addition to UK jazz literature.