Arnold Shaw's 52nd Street: The Street of Jazz was first published in 1971 as The Street That Never Slept. Patrick Burke's study covers the same territory, but extends its attentions in two main directions. One is inward, so to speak, into the music, through analyses of particular recordings that came out of this incubator of jazz which was so important through the 1930s and 1940s. The structure helps to locate the centre of attention; that is it works chronologically from the Street's beginning to its decline as a jazz precinct. At the end an appendix provides an invaluable chronology of the clubs of 52nd Street, a metaphor of what often feels like an autonomous country founded on jazz (‘You am in Jazzmania’, to borrow from a film clip of the era of trumpeter Louis Armstrong).

In the course of that chronicle, the author pauses to examine a number of interwoven issues. The most pervasive is the way race was articulated through the music and the various discourses that enfolded it. Implicated with this was a repertoire of notional (and often actual) binaries including art/entertainment, comedy/seriousness, authenticity/commercialism, and the tensions of gender politics. Although teasing these issues out, Burke confines his discussion largely within the actual Street itself, its musicians, entrepreneurs, its music and even particular songs – the discussion of the hit ‘The Music Goes Round and Round’ was immensely instructive and, quite simply, enjoyable. Likewise the analysis of Stuff Smith's ‘I'se a Muggin’, and the way it incorporated and summarised the ambiguous interplay between black performers and white audiences.

The sallies out into the wider world are rather sparse and tactically modest. The matrix of cultural analysis is thin, its limits generally defined by the model of the street itself, with very occasional glimpses of what lay beyond. To exemplify regarding his central socio-cultural focus, race, Burke observes the increased ‘level of control’ asserted by black musicians and fans through the 1940s. With the emergence of ‘black-owned clubs’ (Burke oscillates between terms like ‘black’ and ‘African American’, as on p. 173), the balance of ownership of 52nd Street was shifting. The irresistible question is why, just then? Burke talks about the stature of Dizzy and Bird and the young bop hipsters, as though the shift was thus generated spontaneously within 52nd Street culture: ‘The increasing prominence of blacks in the 52nd Street audience in the mid-1940s was due … to the appearance of a flashy, controversial subcultural figure: the hipster’ (p. 173, my italics). The fact that we are reminded a moment later that the hipsters were not exclusively black gives greater force to the question: why, just then, this black assertiveness? And the question remains tantalising, because 52nd Street itself is the horizon of the perspective. There is little connection made between external events and this major transition in the race dynamic. It comes over very strongly as an episode in an autonomous local history. The transition is taken as a change in the balance of power within 52nd Street, a shift in its fulcrum of tensions. There is almost no news from outside, and in this case, we are barely even aware that, for example, a world war has been in progress. It is referred to as an influence on the conduct of 52nd Street commerce itself (p. 168). But on the matter of race, its influence is muted almost to silence, tapping unheeded on the bottle in which 52nd Street is sealed.

Yet it might well have been admitted as an event with considerable explanatory power over precisely the dynamics that are central to the author's interests (‘Jazz and Race on 52nd Street’). There are references to servicemen from the south in fights with black fans and musicians, resenting the latter's ‘arrogance’ (p. 177). Why, now, the arrogance? And how did those southern boys get there? Burke shrewdly analyses earlier performer-to-audience confrontations between black and white in which the former triumph, but without violence ensuing (Stuff Smith's ‘counting game’, pp. 81–2). There are many reasons within the boundaries of the performance site, but we need to go beyond that to make sense of the more aggressive encounters of the 1940s. Begin with the war, the cultural and physical dislocations it generated, and the new horizons it opened up. It brought people into the Street, and in coherent and aggressively militant groupings, who might otherwise never have left their southern homes. And at the other end of this literal spectrum, the war had sharpened African American resentments about the disjunction between ‘service’ given for their country overseas and ‘service’ received back home. The assertive blackness of bop amplified, but was not the sole source of, the sense that 52nd Street belonged to them.

This is only one example of the macro-forces shaping the dynamic of this micro-Street. The style wars are discussed with sharp and well-sourced definition, but as a kind of local feud over some stylistic turf which also plays out local sociometrics about race, generation, authenticity. But these ‘style’ wars were part of a far more internationalised encounter that reverberated with the rise of totalitarianism, with Fordist standardisation and later with the politics of the Cold War. Sometimes as the author pores over the details of why 52nd Street developed the way it did I felt like shouting, like a kid in a movie, ‘Watch out, behind you – at the window!’

This leads us back, however, to what is most engaging about the book, which I paid the great compliment of reading through at one sitting. Its appeal lies not just in the subject, but in the author's deep immersion in it. For anyone with an interest in the history of this decisive genre in modern music, 52nd Street is a riveting subject. The discourses which permeated its history also ripple out into studies of all popular music, and in untangling those discourses, Burke provides models that have much broader applicability. But it is 52nd Street that the author places at centre stage, and in so doing he also helps to rescue a number of now largely forgotten musicians from the wings of jazz history.