Black Music, White Business: Illuminating the History and Political Economy of Jazz [Illustrated] [Paperback]

Frank Kofsky (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1998

Probes the conflicts between the artistry of Black musicians and the control by largely white-owned businesses of jazz distribution—the recording companies, booking agencies, festivals, clubs, and magazines.

Product Details

• Paperback: 165 pages
• Publisher: Pathfinder Pr; 1st edition (January 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0873488598
• ISBN-13: 978-0873488594
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #934,821 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An important illumination of the way jazz has worked, January 1, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Black Music, White Business: Illuminating the History and Political Economy of Jazz (Paperback)

As the pithy title suggests, African-American culture has been the primary source of jazz music -- and folks who hail from that culture have had prescious little influence over where the profits from the music have gone... and, even, over who has gotten work and who has been heard.

This book illuminates that ugly side to the jazz world. The first three chapters get things rolling in fits and starts without adequate evidence to demonstrate that the explotation of black musicians has been markedly different from that of other musicians. If this were the bulk of the work it would be interesting reading but would not do much more than preach to the choir.

The rest of the book builds on those chapters, deepens them, broadens them, and creates an inarguable portrait of exploitation that goes so far as to names names *and* provide well-researched explanations that refute, for example, the notion that race is what one should focus on when exploring the history of jazz.

The "black" and "white" of the title may appear to refer to genetics or race -- but the text makes it clear that these are cultural categories and are inextricably bound up within the history of jazz, what it has sounded like, what it sounds like now, and how it has been made.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars General Observations and really great vignettes, May 20, 2003

By 

Tony Thomas (SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Music, White Business: Illuminating the History and Political Economy of Jazz (Paperback)

This book is a useful expose of how the music business scams and exploits all artists, not just Black artists. It is vitally important at a time when the Wynton Marsalis/Albert Murray school of Jazz history is trying to claim that Jazz is a "celebration" of American capitalism. Kofsky shows Jazz musicians have been and continue to be victims of capitalism! And as someone with a background in studying the history of country music and western swing, I can agree with another reviewer here that the same tales of exploitation can be told about white musicans as well.

Kofsky is most effective in the individual stories he tells in the separate articles in this book where as has already been pointed out he "names names." Kofsky unmasks a lot of people who have manufactured images that they were friends of the jazz musician like Blue Note Records.

One of his most interesting vignettes is his exposure of Vanderbuilt heir, self-praising liberal, and paternalist interferer with Jazz John Hammond. He exposes how Hammond's phoney story about Bessie Smith's death was part of the legend that helped net the already-wealthy Hammond scores of thousands of dollars, back when a dollar was a dollar, while Smith and her estate got zilch. Just the Bessie Smith story is worth the price of the book!

While this book is not always available on Amazon, it is always available from BooksfromPathfinder, an Amazon Z store that you can get to by clicking on New and Used further up this page!

4.0 out of 5 stars Music by Outsiders, July 30, 2011

By 

Bonni McKeown - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Black Music, White Business: Illuminating the History and Political Economy of Jazz (Paperback)

Co-author of Stepson of the Blues: A Chicago Song of Survival

I read Frank Kofsky's book Black Music, White Business, as a blues fan and a jazz novice, to see if some of the same economic and racial dynamics around blues music also affect jazz.

Kofsky's Marxist approach allows readers to track social causes of changes in the music. Since jazz's Black originators were second class citizens in America from the get-go, he defines jazz as a music of outsiders. And just like politics, Kofsky contends that music evolves in revolutionary spurts, growing within a framework for awhile and breaking loose into a new form.

For example, the Great Migration was a social condition that changed southern acoustic blues into an upbeat, cityfied electric form. In jazz, Kofsky argues that the post-World War II disillusionment of African Americans, who fought for democracy only to be denied it at home, helped bring about a change from swing to bebop. Kofsky mentions instances of John Coltrane and other jazz innovators actively protesting race discrimination.

Kofsky also asserts that the lack of jazz promotion in the 1960s and 70s was not a market based decision. Rather, he says, it reflected racial biases of White music executives, specifically at Columbia Records, bellwether of the industry. He questions John Hammond Sr.'s 1969 statement that a jazz album had to sell 15,000 units annually to make a profit. He also points out that corporate decisions to skimp on promotion made "jazz doesn't sell" a self fulfilling prophecy. (The same noises issue today from the industry: "blues doesn't sell.") No music will sell if you don't make an effort to sell it!

Even if Kofsky sometimes gets bogged down in self-conscious debates with other jazz critics, Black Music, White Business is an eye opener.