Book Review

Pioneers of Jazz: The Story of the Creole Band. by Lawrence Gushee. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19-516131-9. PP. xiii, 359. $35.00 (cloth).

Perhaps it takes a medievalist (a distinguished one at that) to do justice to the earliest period of jazz, for the scholarly questions both eras raise are akin. how do we hear a music for which there is little or no direct auditory evidence? How do we determine historical reality when so much documentation is lost? How, given the largely improvisatory nature of both musics, should we interpret the few instances of notation that survive? How can we reconstruct the transmission of musical genres from one locale to another? What were the means; what was the pace?