American Commodities in an Age of Empire (review)

in 1907 was to make history. From 1917 until 1940, Marable, the topic of Chapter Two, ran a waterborne jazz “conservatory” for black musicians that emphasized music literacy and professional discipline. Louis Armstrong, Marable’s most famous “graduate” and the subject of Chapter Three, became, for three summers (1919–1921), “the focus of a highly symbolic cultural struggle between oral and literate approaches to musical performance” (75). Subsequent chapters investigate the musical cultures of Memphis and St. Louis; the riverboat careers of Bix Beiderbecke and Jess Stacey; riverboat jazz on the Ohio; and the decline of jazz on the river. Appendices include exhaustive lists of excursion boat musicians and river songs and tunes. The book is well written and well researched. Jazz may have been born in the Crescent City and attained its first maturity in the Windy City, but it “grew up” on the Mississippi. Kenney’s account of the music’s little-known adolescence helps to explain its appeal and acceptance by the general public. University of Richmond Gene Anderson