James Lincoln Collier calls himself a jazz historian, but he does not have much to say about particular performances or recordings, and he mostly ignores jazz after the mid-1950s. His method of excavating and interpreting primary sources provokes a reconsideration of much that is taken for granted about jazz history to the mid-20th century, though, so his books are worthwhile as background to some of the most interesting controversies in the jazz bibliography.

In The Reception of Jazz in America (1988), Collier investigates two myths which he believes have misrepresented the evolution of jazz and its place in American culture. (His subtitle—"A New View”—may be ironic, since his critique takes aim at works published 30 years previous). The first myth is that the American people disdained and ignored jazz for decades, relegating it to the margins of public consciousness; the second myth is that jazz was first taken seriously by Europeans. These myths have been perpetuated in the jazz bibliography by the likes of Whitney Balliett, Rudi Blesh, Marshall Stearns, John Hammond and Eric Hobsbawm—all people who should have known better, in Collier’s opinion.

Writers before Collier (James Weldon Johnson, Ralph Ellison) have situated jazz and black music in general in the mainstream of American culture across the 20th century, but the point bears reiteration. Black performers had been attracting white audiences since the end of the Civil War, in minstrel shows, variety shows and vaudeville. Blacks were producing shows for Broadway in the 1890s, and by the early 20th century ‘black-composed music was part of an accepted national song style.’ After 1910 or so, black musicians took a major role in supplying dance music for whites, from New Orleans to the west coast and in towns along the Mississippi up to Chicago. (James Weldon Johnson wrote a newspaper column in 1915 explaining the phenomenon to a disgruntled white musician). By 1917, says Collier, publications including Variety, Billboard, Literary Digest, and Popular Mechanics were reporting on the jazz ‘craze’ sweeping the nation; ‘by the 1920s, jazz music and jazz dancing…were known and accepted by the public at large.’

As for the question of the reception of jazz in Europe, Collier notes that the 1919 performance in England by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (which made the first jazz record in 1917, in New York) was a flop, and that no ‘important’ American groups visited Europe between the ODJB’s tour in 1919 and Louis Armstrong’s appearance in 1932. A decade after jazz broke through to public consciousness in the U.S., there was little popular interest in jazz in Europe; no cabarets featured jazz full time, the press ignored jazz almost totally, there was no jazz on the radio, and only a small number of ‘real’ jazz records were issued until the end of the 1920s. ‘Record reviewers in European specialty magazines only slowly came to recognize the difference between “hot” music and ordinary dance music.’ Musicians acknowledged as jazz masters in the U.S. met with indifference in Europe: Armstrong’s performances in 1932 and Duke Ellington’s in 1933 did not attract the kinds of large audiences that would have enabled them to work there regularly. Jazz became popular in Europe only during World War Two, says Collier, mostly because the Nazis ‘anathematized jazz as black and Jewish, and going to concerts became a political act.’

Collier’s research into primary sources effectively undermines the myths of American indifference to and European celebration of jazz in the first half of the 20th century, but his critique also raises the question as to why such myths were proffered, believed and perpetuated. His view is that many mid-century jazz critics and commentators were influenced by a ‘leftist’ political agenda which aimed to portray the U.S. as negligent in its devotion to democracy and racial equality. According to Collier, such commentators intended to contrast America’s mistreatment of its own black population, as evidenced by its ignorant dismissal of jazz, with Europeans’ enlightened racial views and embrace of jazz as an art form. The Reception of Jazz in America undercuts that dichotomy, but the problematique is muddier than Collier acknowledges. For instance, the Europeans Robert Goffin and Hugues Panassié are often presented as early authorities on jazz by later writers, but Collier draws attention to the ignorance and prejudice that afflicted both, and cites the low opinions of Goffin and Panassié held by their American contemporaries Otis Ferguson, E. Simms Campbell and Franklin Marshall Davis (each of whom held complicated political views that would take Collier several additional chapters to adequately unpack). Goffin viewed American blacks through a primitivist lens, but he also wrote of the U.S. as a symbol of freedom and democracy for Europeans, and of the genius of jazz as a reflection of the American spirit. Panassié, according to John Gennari, had a bit of a reactionary streak. That jazz can be discussed at all in ideological terms, though, says much about the influence of cultural and sociological conditions on the music (and vice versa), and about the evolution of the writing and thinking about jazz since the first decades of the 20th century. And Collier’s concern with the ideological contents of jazz history also carries contemporary resonance, as the debate about jazz and race flared anew in the 1980s and 90s.
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