Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The book's jacket claims that Santoro will demonstrate "the many ways jazz has colored the entire range of American popular music". But this collection of writings isn't really a unified book about the influence of jazz. But rather a collection of 29 unrelated essays about various artists in different musical genres - country, rock and folk as well as jazz. He occasionally mentions the influnce of jazz on a particular artist. But certainly not all of them and it hardly serves as the major theme tying these separate artists together. Instead the essays tend to comment on particular albums along with a bit of biography and a few anecdotal tales.
Santoro writes better than most music journalists. But he makes numerous factual errors and gets a bit carried away with his constant literary and philosophical references. For example, he says that the Flying Burrito Brother's "Wheels" was about "the urge to jump in the car and get away, light out for the territory on the road like everyone from Huck Finn to the Beats, amid the existential questions tearing (Gram) Parsons, a shrunken Elijah, apart". The entire book is chock of passages like this, along with endless allusions to Hegel, Brecht, existentialism, etc. So if you prefer books without so much intellectual pretense than you should probably stay away from this one.
Jazz is Santoro's forte and I did enjoy his essays on artists such as Louis Armstrong and Max Roach. His essay on Bob Dylan was also good. But on other rock performers, such as the Band and Bruce Springsteen, he really didn't have much new to offer. I think Deadheads will be especially disappointed as he obviously knows less about the Grateful Dead than their legion of devoted fans does.
I would recommend this book for those unfamiliar but curious about jazz, as he does know his stuff on that style of music. But his writings on rock musicians, with the exception of Dylan, can be easily skipped.
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