Gene Lees: Cats of any colour

By GRAHAM REID

The jazz diaspora has meant the music now comes in all colours and today speaks unique languages in Europe, Asia and Africa.

This welcome reprint of this respected critic's anecdotal and insightful early-90s biographical essays and interviews turns the spotlight back on the covert and overt racism encountered by black (and some white) American musicians as they gave the gift of their music to the world.

In the best of all possible worlds music is colourblind, but these essays illustrate how it wasn't.

Part personal encounter with jazz and part history, this is essential reading for anyone engaged by Ken Burns' seminal television series Jazz, which also looked at how musicians negotiated that treacherous middleground between an art form moving faster than the society in which it existed.

Intelligent, informative and offering astute biographies, and the final chapter which skewers Wynton Marsalis' control of jazz today and his reverse-racism is terrific.

Perseus

$54.95