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John Gennari. 2006. Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Reviewed by Paul Steinbeck
John Gennari's Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics is a comprehensive history of American jazz criticism since the 1930s, centered on the foremost cultural achievement of the jazz critical field: "jazz's canonization as an art" (15). The conceptual and historical framework of Blowin' Hot and Cool originated in Gennari's 1991 article "Jazz Criticism: Its Development and Ideologies," which was written at a time when the jazz canonization process still seemed incomplete: "Even though jazz has found a place in such respectable institutions as the Ivy League university, the New Yorker, and, just recently, Lincoln Center, it continues to struggle for the recognition and the critical understanding that it deserves" (1991:452). In the fifteen years or so since Gennari's assessment, the canonization of jazz has been assured, largely because of the Jazz at Lincoln Center juggernaut and its affiliated critics and cultural output-the 2001 Ken Burns documentary for PBS, for example-but also through the intellectual work of what Gennari calls the "new interdisciplinary 'jazz studies,'" a field comprised of scholars from various disciplines including American studies, history, literature, and to a lesser extent ("new") musicology (John Gennari is an associate professor of English and the director of the ALANA US ethnic studies program at the University of Vermont). According to Gennari, the new jazz studies "considers how jazz as an experience of sounds, movements, and states of feeling has always been mediated and complicated by peculiarly American cultural patterns."1 In Blowin' Hot and Cool, Gennari explains how "critics have been among the most important jazz mediators" between musicians and audiences (13).
For Gennari, the jazz critical discourse was and is central to jazz history and its meaning in American culture: "When we talk about jazz . . . we're talking in a language and through conceptual categories that have been established by critics"-in record reviews, jazz-press writings, liner notes, radio broadcasts, university classes, and books (3-4). Jazz critics' words are so powerful, that "even when we occupy the same space as performing musicians, our perceptions of what we are hearing are indelibly, if invisibly, mediated by what we have heard before, including...