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SELECTIONS FROM THE GUTTER: Jazz Portraits from ""The Jazz Record by Art & Chadwick Hansen--Eds. Hodes

SELECTIONS FROM THE GUTTER: Jazz Portraits from ""The Jazz Record

By

Pub Date: June 27th, 1977
Publisher: Univ. of California Press

It flows out. You're tellin' the truth."" Legendary, hitherto ""inarticulate"" jazz musicians flowed out their truth for four years (1943-1947) into the pages of The Jazz Record--via the coaxing of two-fisted piano-man/raconteur/editor Art Hodes and the speed-typing of co-editor Dale Curran. So here--in addition to Hodes' own jivey reminiscences of Chicago's fertile South Side, surveys of New Orleans beginnings by John A. Provenzano, and portraits of sidemen and soloing stars by such polished pens as Alma Hubner, Carl Van Vechten, and Robert Alan Aurthur--are the voices (perhaps a bit too cleaned up and evened out) of the music-makers themselves: Cow Cow Davenport, ""Big Bill"" Broonzy, Warren ""Baby"" Dodds, Pops Foster, George Lewis. . . and Satchmo (""I'm telling you, I usta really chirp"") in a highly endearing interview. Abetted by Hodes' anecdotal headnotes and backed up by pieces on disc-making hassles and other cultist paraphernalia, this jam session of profiles and full-faces scats along into a literary-oral history of jazz fathers and their first-generation descendants. The Jazz Record cost 25 cents, was one of the first general-public journals to put black faces on the cover, and has now been preserved in a handsome, illustrated scrapbook that will give curious neophytes a solid dunking and will end many an aficionado's search for hard-to-find back issues.