Alwyn Turner
Pop Will Eat Itself
Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone – 125 Years of Pop Music
By Peter Doggett
The Bodley Head 712pp £25
The postwar British cult of revivalist jazz was a curiously paradoxical affair. The initial intention was to resist the rise of bebop and other deviations from the true path by reasserting the roots of the music – ‘to unearth the principles which distinguished the early jazz forms, which had become almost obscured beneath an accumulation of decadent influences’, as the Old Etonian trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton put it in 1949. The result was a fiercely conservative movement in which much energy was expended debating whether, for example, a string bass was an appropriate rhythm instrument or whether the sousaphone was more authentic. When, a few years later, Lyttelton had the temerity to introduce a saxophonist to his own band, the unfortunate musician’s first solo was greeted with catcalls from traditionalists in the audience and the unfurling of a banner that read, ‘Go home, dirty bopper.’
And yet, for all its retrophilia, revivalist jazz was also a ground-breaking innovation. It was, as Peter Doggett points out in his fine new book, the first musical movement that drew its influences entirely from recordings. The style that was being revived had effectively died out before the war, and
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In 1524, hundreds of thousands of peasants across Germany took up arms against their social superiors.
Peter Marshall investigates the causes and consequences of the German Peasants’ War, the largest uprising in Europe before the French Revolution.
Peter Marshall - Down with the Ox Tax!
Peter Marshall: Down with the Ox Tax! - Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War by Lyndal Roper
literaryreview.co.uk
The Soviet double agent Oleg Gordievsky, who died yesterday, reviewed many books on Russia & spying for our pages. As he lived under threat of assassination, books had to be sent to him under ever-changing pseudonyms. Here are a selection of his pieces:
Literary Review - For People Who Devour Books
Book reviews by Oleg Gordievsky
literaryreview.co.uk
The Soviet Union might seem the last place that the art duo Gilbert & George would achieve success. Yet as the communist regime collapsed, that’s precisely what happened.
@StephenSmithWDS wonders how two East End gadflies infiltrated the Eastern Bloc.
Stephen Smith - From Russia with Lucre
Stephen Smith: From Russia with Lucre - Gilbert & George and the Communists by James Birch
literaryreview.co.uk