The title of Dale Chapman's book borrows a phrase coined in 2004 by the Chicago Tribune’s jazz critic, Howard Reich, inspired by the late 1990s financial phenomenon known as the dot-com bubble. In his closely argued text, Chapman explores Reich's proposition that the jazz bubble which had emerged prominently earlier in that same decade, ‘much like its stock market counterpart, reflected an unsustainable over-investment in the single, homogenous (sic) niche market of neo-classical jazz’ (p. 27). By combining his formidably detailed knowledge of the financial and jazz worlds in general, and of neoliberal socio-economic thinking and so-called ‘neoclassical’ jazz in particular, Chapman is able to construct often compelling arguments which skilfully relate the two in various meaningful and hitherto unexplored ways. Although the inevitably jargon-laden and sometimes highly detailed discussions of economic strategies threaten to become a heavy read at times, Chapman is consistently careful to explain investment and corporate trends and their associated terminologies, and always does this with considerable clarity. Readers who might remain sceptical about the validity of some of the direct comparisons he draws between those trends and jazz – or who are perplexed by the sometimes rather abrupt and probably unavoidable lurches from discussions of one area to parallel considerations of the other – are nevertheless likely to come away from the book with a greatly enriched understanding of modern economic history and its impact on musical cultures and urban life.

The ground plan Chapman has evolved to tackle his remit works well. It comprises a substantial introduction, which could also serve as a useful stand-alone overview of the entire territory he surveys later in the book, followed by three pairs of chapters which are thematically related. Of the opening pair, the first chapter investigates improvisation and other jazz performance practices as a powerful metaphor for risk: ‘What improvised aesthetics offers to corporate thought leaders’, Chapman explains, ‘is precisely a fantasy of liquidity, a means of realizing the disruptive turbulence of contemporary market dynamics as something playfully ebullient and eminently positive’ (p. 22). The chapter then focusses on the work of the second (1960s) Miles Davis Quintet, including Herbie Hancock's apposite conception of that group's ‘controlled freedom’, as a potent stylistic model for the ‘young lions’ of neoclassical jazz who reshaped the music more conservatively from the late 1980s onwards. Vividly reconstructing a unique watershed moment in jazz history, the second chapter turns its attention to the triumphant return to New York from Europe which put saxophonist Dexter Gordon spectacularly back on the US jazz map in the late 1970s, quickly becoming an indelible icon of the essentially nostalgic neotraditionalism which inspired those young lions as they came onto the scene.

The second pair of chapters charts the history of Verve Records and its parent companies from 1956 to 2005, the two sequential accounts offering between them a detailed narrative of the tangible impact of changing market dynamics on the shaping of the artists’ roster of a major record label: the first shift in outlook came with the vertical integration attendant on Verve's acquisition by MGM Records in 1961, the musical landscape changing again with the purchase of MGM/Verve by Polygram in 1972 – when the ‘loose–tight’ (p. 118) nature of such federated corporate structures served as another metaphor for the ‘controlled freedom’ of jazz – and shifting once again as a consequence of the merger with Universal in 1998. The general trajectory described here is of a move away from popularising jazz (1960s) to aligning it with ways in which classical music had successfully been marketed (1970s), in particular assigning the new neoclassical jazz to its own distinct niche (1980s), before the increasingly competitive bidding to sign up new artists of this ilk (akin to a ‘market psychology of speculative bubbles’ characterised by ‘“hype-driven” herd behavior’; p. 135) was eventually diluted by a commercially driven turn towards more populist styles once the initial boom in CD sales had begun to wane.

The last two chapters, concerned with the relationship between jazz venues and urban redevelopment, both investigate the reshaping of parts of San Francisco in ways that proved at first detrimental to, and later to the ostensible (but arguably specious) advantage of, its cultural milieux. Taking as his point of departure Henri Lefebvre's concept of the ‘right to the city’ (p. 157), Chapman provides a sometimes disturbing account of the fluctuating fortunes of the Fillmore District (popularly known since its 1940s heyday as the ‘Harlem of the West’), which was redeveloped to the serious detriment of its residents in a move that seemed to equate the area's ‘blight’ status with its essential blackness, and resulted in the displacement of thousands of African Americans and Japanese Americans. The final chapter assesses the significance of the 2007 opening of Yoshi's SF venue at the Fillmore Heritage Centre as an apparent act of belated civic atonement, a gesture that sadly the financial crisis of 2008 ensured was ultimately destined to fail. (As I write, in August 2018, the San Francisco Chronicle has just announced legal proceedings launched by the City Attorney against a real-estate developer who allegedly still owes $5.5 million in unrepaid loans advanced for the resurrection of the now empty Heritage Centre. The ‘business model didn't really work’, he reportedly told the Chronicle in 2015.) The topic of urban redevelopment and its consequences for jazz returns the reader to issues covered in the book's introduction, where The People's Health New Orleans Jazz Market (partly funded by Goldman Sachs’ Urban Investment Group) had served as a preliminary case study of a contemporary initiative conceived, in the words of the NO Jazz Orchestra's spokesman, to ‘enhance life, transform place, and elevate spirit’ (p. 3). The downside of this was what Chapman considers as the venture's ‘potential to serve as a beachhead for unwanted gentrification’ (p. 3) at the same time as having a tangibly detrimental impact on the domestic and economic fortunes of its immediate locale.

Although the final chapter in a sense returns us to the opening of the book, and (as noted above) the introduction in itself constitutes a more than adequately cogent overview of the territory that the volume as a whole surveys, the author offers no overall general conclusions to round out his project. It would have been instructive, for example, to consider the extent to which the fascinating parallels and perspectives he explores might be relevant to modern jazz as a global rather than American phenomenon: apart from a brief summary of the Danish jazz scene which Gordon left to return to New York (pp. 76‒7), the book is exclusively concerned with jazz in its country of origin, although it is acknowledged that Europe-based corporate interests (Philips, PolyGram) were partly at stake here. As with many scholarly publications on jazz, this geographical limitation of the book's coverage is rather taken for granted, and not acknowledged in the wording of its title. With as much as one-quarter of the book's full extent devoted to endnotes and bibliography, it's a pity that a little space couldn't have been found in which to broaden the volume's international musical and cultural (as opposed to corporate) outlook a little – even if only to throw up wider questions that future authors might be encouraged to address as this field of enquiry continues to expand. Yet this slight reservation in no way detracts from the impressive nature of the manifold and sometimes profound insights that Chapman offers the reader in his virtuosic dissection of the often uneasy, and sometimes downright bleak, interactions between contemporary commerce, art and the city.