Bruce Crowther and Mike Pinfold

Singing Jazz:
The Singers and Their Styles

by Bruce Crowther and Mike Pinfold

Reviewed by Phillip D. Atteberry

This material is copyrighted and was originally published in The Mississippi Rag.

San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 1997. $17.95
This book has a three-fold purpose: to define jazz singing, to discuss the career challenges that jazz singers face, and to provide an historical overview of important jazz singers. The book is rich in informative detail but tedious to read because it is too much like an encyclopedia. Mountains biographical sketches are included, along with snippets of interviews and analyses of singers and the music industry. Virtually every singer of any significance is mentioned. Most are given two or three pages. Major figures like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Torme receive eight to ten pages. The discussions are good starting points for newcomers, but those familiar with the music will find nothing new.

Of more interest is the focus on jazz singing as a career--how career challenges have changed over the years and how various singers have struggled to adapt. Comments by Susannah McCorkle, Wesla Whitfield, Lucy Reed, Annie Ross and a host of others are interesting, but presented in little morsels here and there, making it difficult—as a reader—to gain momentum.

In short, the parts of this book are greater than its whole. I can imagine myself referring to it often (the directory of jazz singers at the end is more thorough than any I’ve seen), but this isn’t a book that most people will enjoy reading from cover to cover. To paraphrase badly the English poet John Donne, some books are merely to be tasted, others nibbled at, and others thoroughly devoured. This is a nibbling kind of a book, the kind you are glad to have when life gives you twenty minutes of idle time.