When Genres Collide: Down Beat, Rolling Stone, and the Struggle between Jazz and Rock by Matt Brennan (review)

In his new book, Matt Brennan seeks to investigate two puzzles of popular-music history: first, to investigate why jazz and rock scholarship are so segregated if not resistant to one another; and secondly, why jazz and rock have been treated differently in the press despite their shared characteristics. In many ways, the first question is answered through a thorough investigation of the second, as Brennan focuses primarily on jazz and rock criticism history through the lens of the periodicals Down Beat and Rolling Stone.

The contents are more comprehensive than the title suggests. The book covers not only occasions when the two genres collide, but also the origins of jazz criticism and the founding of Down Beat in 1934, one year before Benny Good-man's rise to stardom. Each chapter could be read on its own, though they speak to each other by painting a picture of jazz and rock's separate rise to legitimization in an almost symbiotic relationship, where one genre defines itself in opposition to the other. The first chapter maps the rise of jazz culture as a precursor to rock'n'roll, while the second chapter outlines the dismissal of rock'n'roll in Down Beat. Chapter 3 looks at how the existing jazz press covered rock's emergence. Chapter 4, which could be seen as the cultural response to chapter 3, covers the emergence of rock critics and others who founded publications such as Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy! in order to discuss the music in the way they wanted. Chapter 5 focuses on the press at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1969, very much an experiment in booking rock, funk, and jazz acts all together, which led to crowd disturbances. Newport's reception becomes another avenue by which to discuss various assumptions about these genres and the journalistic discourses surrounding them.

Brennan tells us that new magazines focusing on rock criticism grew out of a dissatisfaction with jazz writers trying to write about rock; the author makes the case that rock journalists over-exaggerated their originality and place in the wider history. His point is that it had been done before for jazz, and the radicalization of the 1955 moment (when rock'n'roll emerges in the mainstream) has seemed to make us, and popular music studies, forgetful. They were both youth-oriented musics, with big-band jazz leading the way with features we associate with popular music: 'jazz was arguably the first popular style to generate a fully fledged art world with a community of critics, articulate musicians, and avid readers producing an unprecedentedly rich popular music discourse in books, magazines, newspapers, and mimeographs' (p. 5).

The narrative and tone are those of a competent music historian, one who is respectful of the story, its cast of characters, and their voices. The book is peppered with long-forgotten magazine covers, which remind us what a range Down Beat and Rolling Stone used to cover. Bill Haley and the Comets and The Beatles feature on the covers of Down Beat, while Sun Ra features on Rolling Stone's. Such images on their own could have been the inspiration for a book-length study. We have quotations from and interviews with rock and jazz writers, and in many cases, they are foregrounded to tell the story. The author rarely relies on hindsight to theorize his subject matter, or at least one gets the impression that he is painting a picture from the ground up. In other words, this is not about our own times, though readers familiar with pop discourse will see parallels with myriad material beyond the scope of the book. Issues regarding politics, race, and genre are addressed, but very often treated within their own discursive worlds at the time. We are not hit over the head with contemporary theory, but such perspectives are not swept under the rug either...