Priestly presents an interesting version of the history of jazz, looking at how the technology and business of recording influenced the music. Priestly acknowledges that musical forms developed and evolved before they were recorded, but also notes that recordings helped shape and disseminate key elements of style and technique.

Many of the black musicians playing jazz early in the 20th c. refused to record for fear that their licks would be copied and stolen, so the history of recorded jazz began (1917) with the irony of the all-white Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Jazz evolved from blues and ragtime, but the ODJB was a weak harbinger of what was to come, in Priestly’s view. More revelatory were the ‘stride’ pieces originally recorded for player-piano rolls around the same time. More dynamic than ragtime, stride piano playing featured the rhythmic counterpoint, ‘blue notes’ and the uneven phrasing that would come to distinguish jazz from other instrumental music. (Writing in 1988, Priestly has the advantage of hindsight over commentators who heard the earliest jazz records firsthand.)

The early-1920s recordings of Joe ‘King’ Oliver (with his archetypal Storyville-to-Chicago arc) were among the first to capture the subtlety and emotional ambiguity of jazz, says Priestly, though the recording techniques of the time were inadequate for the complexity of King Oliver’s music. Drummer Warren ‘Baby’ Dodds had to use a severely depleted kit to avoid overloading the recording equipment, and the string bass was not picked up at all (which necessitated the use of bass saxophone). Much of the appeal of the recordings came from the harmonized two-cornet breaks of Oliver and Louis Armstrong, who with his bright, penetrating tone had to stand ten feet away from the recording horn. White bands like the ODJB imitated black bands but diluted and denatured the music, writes Priestly, though a handful of white musicians did seriously pursue the depth and swing of black jazz. (The career of clarinetist Leon Roppolo of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, the jazz world’s first ‘Great White Hope,’ in Priestly’s words, was cut short when he was confined to a mental home, the standard treatment at that time for marijuana ‘addicts.’)

The popularity of race records in the 1920s inspired record producers to innovate in pursuit of sales. The addition of saxophones and strings and precise arrangements led to the proliferation of mainstream big bands (a development lamented by jazz purists at the time) away from the loose, improvising New Orleans-style combos. Meanwhile, says Priestly, the technical virtuosity and range of expression achieved by Armstrong (in the bands of King Oliver then Fletcher Henderson) elevated the works of other big bands and challenged the abilities of their rhythm sections. In the late-20s, with the advent of the electrical recording process and the use of microphones, Armstrong and his producers finally began to figure out how to capture more sophisticated rhythms and percussive sounds, and innovators like Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington began to bring better writing and arranging and superior players to their recording sessions. Okeh Records, which issued Armstrong’s singles, sent out the first mobile recording units, providing a picture of jazz activity around the country and revealing the extent to which a new generation of musicians (Bix Beiderbecke among them) was learning to play by listening to records. Recording captured off-the-cuff improvisations and made them reproducible. In some cases, the solos featured on race records were transcribed and recorded by white sessionmen, then released under pseudonyms like “The Arkansas Travellers” or “The Five Birmingham Babies”—likely as an attempt to disguise the race of the musicians involved.

In the 1930s, recorded music had to compete with commercial radio and sound films. The Great Depression sent many American musicians to Europe in search of employment. American record companies were kept alive by the playing of recorded music in public; the jukebox was popular in black neighborhoods and provided session work for musicians from black ‘dance orchestras’ who were rarely heard on radio. Fats Waller formed a small group to take advantage of this system and helped created a style that evolved into R&B. Jukebox hits also launched the careers of Billie Holiday and Count Basie, whose sound incorporated the blues inflections of southern musicians who had migrated to Kansas City and the sublime rhythm section led by Jo Jones. Big band leaders Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, featured on regular radio series programs, began to hire and feature more rhythmically sophisticated musicians and presented them in trio and quartet settings.

A strike organized in the early 1940s by sheet music publishers in a grievance over royalties for live radio performances had the effect of encouraging radio stations to feature older unpublished recorded material, and record companies began recording musicians playing original material in order to avoid paying royalties. After the war, the popularity of danceable R&B surged and jazz record companies faced new competition for radio and jukebox play. The introduction (1948) of 33 1/3 long-playing microgroove albums encouraged record companies to reissue old 78s, now with superior sound, and led to a revival of traditionalist early jazz at the same time as more adventurous musicians were inventing altogether new sounds. Jazz in the 1950s, in dialogue with a range of popular musics, began incorporating Latin rhythms and elements of soul and funk.

1950s technology influenced the music in new directions. Recording tape and better microphones enabled sophisticated editing and splicing, multitracking and overdubbing to go along with the longer recording times available on 33 1/3 discs. The ‘spacious but detailed’ sound achieved in the home studio of a former optometrist named Rudy Van Gelder made Hackensack a mecca for recorded jazz. Technology also helped elevate star performers above their accompanists: producers would record large-scale written arrangements then bring in the soloist later. Other artists favored spontaneity and used the new technology to capture the energy of group interplay ‘live in the studio’ (think of the jazz workshops of Charles Mingus). The availability and portability of the new technology enabled Sun Ra to start his own record company and to accumulate hundreds of rehearsal and concert recordings that were issued (however irregularly) between the late 1950s and early 1990s.

As the emergence of rock reduced the commercial appeal of jazz through the 1960s and 1970s, small European and Japanese labels provided work for American musicians and European players inspired by earlier American records. Some record companies promoted slicker sounds and packaging, and jazz-rock fusion combined (the worst) bits of both.

Priestly, a Brit, is particularly strong on the role played by European promoters and record companies in sustaining American jazz musicians during hard times. As for the music, he uncovers some interesting information to help fill in a picture of the early decades of jazz, but his take on the aftermath of bebop and beyond is muddled and sloppy. For instance, without knowing better, one might come away from Jazz on Record thinking that the electric bands of Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time are in the same category as Weather Report and Return to Forever. Nope. This is still a worthwhile book, for what it claims to be, and there are other sources for reading on the music qua music. Priestly inspires us to seek out the old recordings, and we are fortunate that many of them, including piano rolls and wax platters, have been digitally preserved and are available online.

There's a pretty good chapter on free / avant-garde jazz, but a lot of it bogs down in arcane record company machinations. I personally am really fascinated by stuff like arcane record company machinations, but I don't think the average person would be. As the title states, this book mainly focuses on the impact that key jazz records (LPs/CDs/cassettes) have had, not on live music.