Customer Reviews

Black Music, White Business: Illuminating the History and Political Economy of Jazz

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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.

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!

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.

A book so bitter about how the big record business has abused the jazz musician that it loses all perspective or even a grip on reality.
Under close examination, Kofsky's rabid polemic doesn't stack up. His vitriolic attack on John Hammond is a case in point. As a Marxist, Kofsky can't even entertain the idea that Hammond, a Vanderbilt-heir, could ever be altruistic. With more scholarship and less soap-box ranting, Kofsky's thesis may have been more credible, but his anger lets him down. He distorts statistics in a dishonest way - eg the case of Hammond allegedly receiving royalties from a Bessie Smith retrospective, and his donation to fundraising to give Smith a headstone. Kofsky updates the royalties to contemporary dollar value, but not Hammond's donation, to make it look even more tight-fisted.
Hammond was a vociferous advocate for jazz and civil rights, and had the wherewithal to say what he thought. To Kofsky, this is self-aggrandisement.
Kofsky accuses jazz critics of 'intellectual dishonesty': this diatribe is a blatant example of exactly that. Yes, musicians have been ripped off. But it's also a ripoff to suggest this book has anything to do with music, or anything of value to add to our understanding of music history or the music business.

I had high recommendations for this one. It turned out to be a big disappointment. What comes across first and foremost is the author's bitterness. I was expecting a well researched and impartial book, but instead I had to go through pages of the author's personal problems with critics and music businessmen.
Furthermore, he has racist discourse, even if in a kind of Thomas Dunwitty way (see Spike Lee's "Bamboozled"). He insists that Jazz is black music, an attitude I would like to see discouraged for any music genre. I would be the last to try to diminish the importance of Ellingtons and Parkers and Minguses and Coltranes. But what to say of Bill Evans, Gil Evans, Jaco Pastorius, Stan Getz, Stephane Grappeli, Benny Goodman, Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Joe Zawinul, etc? Did they NOT contribute with their own perspective to the music? And did they NOT suffer as much from the same people who were taking advantage of black artists?
And so the author fails to make his point. Had he made a more thorough research he would have found that record companies have never made much distinction about race or genre when it comes to making a dollar, in ANY music genre.
And what if he remembered to tell how many artists make a profit for a record company and how many flop? THAT would have put things in a different perspective. And if he spent any time talking about Oscar Peterson and Norman Granz's friendship (and many other inter-racial music businessman-artist ones)? And what to say of his criticism of record companies for spending more on classical music than on jazz recordings?
This book doesn't even give the reader an imaginative conspiracy theory. RUN FROM IT!