Crooning emerged as a style that contemporaneous audiences, black and white, read as “white”: it wasn’t until the early 1930s that African American crooners appeared on record. This delay is unusual in American music, where innovations in vernacular music ordinarily have African American origins. That delay is explicable, however, once we recover what crooning signified for black audiences and how that signified meant something different to white audiences. More interesting still is the fact that crooning continues to play a role in contemporary African American music, long after white audiences abandoned it as old-fashioned. The apotheosis of this pattern can be heard in the 1963 record, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. Trane then made his one record with a vocalist for fairly obvious reasons, but it is less clear why he chose to do so, not with a jazz singer, but a crooner.

Focusing on recently come-to-light recordings of interviews with musicians conducted by jazz critic and historian Frank Kofsky, this essay takes as its point of departure a reconsideration of Kofsky’s influential yet controversial theories about the transformations (creative and political) occurring in the jazz world during the Black Arts Movement era. The essay notes how the interviews showcase an analytical nuance that many of Kofsky’s critics do not recognize, but still shows how he might have theorized the “revolution in music” differently if he had listed to his interviewees more carefully. Musicians’ comments, the essay suggests, help us understand the multiplicity of the so-called jazz revolution in ways that exceed any simple notions of politics or identity. They also help us understand how the weight of political expectation vis-à-vis “the Black community” and “the revolution” was itself an aesthetically productive force, whether musicians were working with or against it.

After Gillespie's return fron California, the big band he formed had a rhythm section of John Lewis, Ray Brown, Milt Jackson and Kenny Clarke. This chapter explores how that quartet became the MJQ and developed into one of the most influential jazz groups of the 1950s to the 1980s. Shipton discusses basses with Percy Heath and the difficulties of playing both piano and vibes with Milt Jackson.