Audio By Carbonatix
The world is too much with reference books, guides, and the like, but the two new rock-and-roll road compendiums are something new and different. Up to a point, anyway.
In February of 1991 the Addison Wesley Publishing Company shipped a softcover called The Jazz and Blues Lover’s Guide to the U.S. that falls somewhere between a standard reference (such as Pharos Books’ Ultimate Guide to Independent Record Labels and Artists) and the somewhat more literary (the new works by Dave Walker and A.M. Nolan). Jazz and Blues contains a measure of fiery opinion and selective insight, but much of it also concentrates on providing something purely useful for the already interested. While the rock-and-roll opuses make a trip more fun, this guide is indispensable to any serious musical odyssey, with source listings, clubs, landmarks, radio stations, anything and everything pertinent. “I did hope to open it up to people who don’t know that much about jazz and blues,” says author Christiane Bird. “That’s why there’s a section in the back with a brief history — to guide people who don’t know that much. It is specialized, just like the subject matter.”
Bird, a New Yorker, wrote travel stories for the Daily News for five years. About four years ago she left to pursue a career as a freelancer and at about that time visited Kansas City’s Eighteenth and Vine neighborhood. Freshly interested in jazz — “Wow, here was this enormous field that I didn’t know anything about,” she says now — Bird was inspired by the sidewalk plaques commemorating the scores of notable, but gone, sites in that area. Eighteenth and Vine might be compared to Miami’s Overtown — once a thriving hub with dozens of clubs and boundless cultural activity, since quieted.
Now in its third printing, with an updated edition tentatively planned to begin next spring for publication the following year, the Jazz and Blues Lovers’ Guide accomplishes Bird’s goal: “I feel that jazz and blues don’t get as much recognition as they should,” the writer says, “and this was a way to bring these forms to public notice, and hopefully get more people interested, especially in jazz.”
The book is dense with detail, light on the trivia. “I’d like it to be seen as both practical and historical,” Bird says. “There’s so much interesting history attached to jazz and blues — racial, the settlement of the U.S., urban social anthropology.” And the music.
