In New York during the late 1930s and 1940s it was said that if you asked a cab driver to take you to “the street,” you would be taken to Fifty-second Street, such was its reputation for jazz musicians and aficionados. It also remains an iconic memory in the visual culture of jazz through, for example, William Gottlieb's noirish photographs of the rainy street at night with its neon signs of the famous venues – the Onyx, Famous Door, Three Deuces – telling of the many great jazz names who played there. Here, located in the short distance between Fifth and Seventh Avenues, a wandering listener in 1946 would have heard emanating from various doorways a remarkable juxtaposition of jazz styles from revivalist Dixieland and swing to bebop. “On 52nd Street,” said pianist Marian McPartland, “you could walk through the history of jazz.”

As Patrick Burke points out in this excellent study, the street's reputation as a centre for jazz began during Prohibition with musicians playing (and drinking) in the illicit speakeasies there. The repeal of Prohibition saw several legal nightclubs opening on the street and, by the late 1930s, with the national popularity of swing, it accommodated a series of clubs that attracted both the jazz cognoscenti and a wider clientele. These typically small venues provided an alternative to the big-band arrangements that dominated the commercial music industry, enabling musicians such as Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday and Art Tatum to work in a more intimate and improvisational idiom in the form of small-group swing. With the postwar decline of the swing era, the street provided venues for bebop's leading figures such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

Burke's study differs significantly from an earlier account of the street, Arnold Shaw's The Street That Never Slept: New York's Fabled 52nd Street (1971), not least in its recognition of the complexities of racial discourse in relation to jazz, when earlier jazz histories often saw “black” and “white” as adequate racial categories. Come in and Hear the Truth uses a fresh methodological approach with the use of ethnomusicology together with cultural and social history to tell a “seemingly familiar story” in new and revealing ways. Burke raises important questions here about the shifting racial politics of jazz culture during the two main decades of Fifty-second Street's history, questions which encompass ideas about the meanings of racial identity in musical performance and reception in the context of commercial entertainment. Drawing on a richly eclectic range of newspapers, journals and popular magazines, studio recordings and radio broadcasts, photographs and films, as well as oral histories and original interviews with the street's various performers, patrons and other participants, Burke has deftly pieced together a history of establishments where documentary evidence is – understandably – often scarce. (There is a fascinating appendix which catalogues the street's clubs and their chronology.) This engaging and enjoyable account shows real insight into the “jazz and race” dimension of this important site and demonstrates how far jazz studies has developed in recent years as a sharp and vibrant discipline.