At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz. Darren Mueller. Durham: Duke University Press, 2024. 448 pp. 20 illustrations. ISBN: 9781478030072. $31.95. (Paperback)
Books about jazz records generally fall into two categories. On the one hand, discographies—from the earliest lists of “hot jazz” discs, through the Penguin Guide and Scott Yanow’s Jazz on Record—have served as guidebooks for budding enthusiasts. On the other, a handful of classic albums---Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme, especially—have inspired the literary tributes that classics do. Lurking behind both is an ambivalence about recorded media itself: the guidebooks and the exegeses treat recordings as documents of a music that lives outside the music industry. This makes Darren Mueller’s At The Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz both welcome and necessary.
At the Vanguard of Vinyl represents an extensive consideration of how one format—the twelve-inch long-playing record (LP)—has shaped jazz as we know it. Despite its straightforward subtitle, the book reveals how messy and contingent the form really was. “The ubiquitous presence of the 12-inch vinyl record in the decades since the 1950s,” Mueller writes, “has made the integration of the LP seem brief and even uneventful, obscuring the decade-long period during which record makers experimented with how best to leverage its potential” (5-6).
The book does justice to this complexity by treating LPs as reflections and prisms of a host of agents, and not primarily as documents or works. Some jazz enthusiasts may be disappointed in how little biography and lore feature in Mueller’s narration. Frequently mythologized figures like Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Charles Mingus, for example, appear as canny operators navigating uncertain terrain, rather than as self-assured auteurs. Filled with references to botched recordings and performances, inelegant edits and overdubs, At the Vanguard of Vinyl does not romanticize. Moreover, substantial portions of the book are devoted to executives and producers like Bob Weinstock, George Avakian, and Orrin Keepnews and to the practicalities of studio engineering, graphic design, and liner-note composition.
But Mueller’s ambition here is not to pile up trivia. His largest claim is that the LP format altered the very consistency of jazz itself. Through its ability to collect and remediate older recordings, and through the related capacities for high-fidelity recording—in studios, festivals, and nightclubs—the LP encouraged a markedly historical consciousness as a major component of jazz reception (hence the guidebooks mentioned above!). At the same time, jazz’s assumption of the LP—a format originally reserved for European concert music—afforded the music a serious reception it might not otherwise have sustained (hence the shelf space devoted to Kind of Blue!). And yet, Mueller emphasizes, this dual reception was also shaped by the social constraints of race and gender, as embodied, for example, by the white male executives who directed the recording industry.
The six chapters that form the core of the book come in pairs, each corresponding to a distinct historical phase. (Mueller helpfully includes “playlists” of the relevant LPs at the end of each chapter.) The first phase, which Mueller calls “experimentation” (29), explores the uncertainties of the LP format’s early years, when “record labels, equipment manufacturers, record shops, and consumers did not know where to put their resources” (49). Chapter One follows the circulation of the R&B hit “The Huckle-Buck”—its journey from 78-rpm singles to twenty-minute jam sessions—in order to trace the 1950s construction of jazz as a “prestige” genre decoupled from Black popular music. Of course, “prestige” was not just industry jargon: it was also the name of an important jazz record label. Chapter Two uses that label’s interest in musical mistakes and session dialogue as evidence of a “White modernist documentary impulse” at odds with jazz’s “Black expressivity” (79-83).
The two moments of the second phase, labeled “standardization,” focus on Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, respectively (29). Chapter Three covers the former’s famous 1956 Newport Jazz Festival performance, using that event’s famously edited “live” recording to untangle the competing interests involved: the elite denizens of Newport, the musicians, and the sound engineers. Chapter Four, which focuses on Gillespie’s World Statesman and Dizzy in Greece LPs, revisits familiar terrain of jazz and Cold War diplomacy, arguing that these discs—ostensibly documents of Gillespie’s State Department-sponsored tours—“became objects through which the abstract connection between jazz and the nation-state could materialize” (189).
Two mature works represent the last phase, which Mueller characterizes as “arrival” (29). The sixth and final chapter positions Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um as something like the culmination of the era. Theorizing Ah Um and Mingus’s previous attempts to run a record label as cases of “avant-garde entrepreneurialism,” the chapter contributes to the growing academic literature on the bassist (238). More surprising is the preceding chapter on Cannonball Adderley’s Quintet in San Francisco. This LP—less vaunted, but more commercially successful than Ah Um—is read by Mueller as a joyful document of “sonic Black sociality” (194).
As this latter formulation suggests, Mueller correctly insists throughout the book that “the history of the LP cannot be untangled from the ideologies of social difference that surrounded its creation, adoption, and eventual dominance,” and further that Black musicians in this period “skillfully leveraged” the transition in formats to “redefine prevailing notions of Blackness within the United States” (7). Frequently, however, these themes remain vague or unrealized. For as Mueller quickly notes in the Introduction, “male-dominated conditions of record making reinscribed notions of masculine privilege and control” (13). Elsewhere, “segregational logics” are also held to be at work, frustrating the agency of Black musicians (29), and “preexisting scripts” determine musical value (149). None of this is wrong, and Mueller is certainly meeting reality by not providing an overly tidy narrative. But the actual content of “prevailing notions,” “logics,” and “scripts” is not always precisely articulated. It would be helpful to know more concretely, for example, how the racial fantasies that underwrote the dance-band 78 era were transformed in the age of the hi-fi LP. Furthermore, Mueller’s focus is almost entirely on the decisions made in the control room, the studio, and the art department. There is little attempt at documenting consumer reception, for example—undoubtedly a difficult task, but one essential for a true cultural history.
Despite these reservations, At the Vanguard of Vinyl represents an original and nuanced take on the course of post-war jazz. Extensively researched and subtle, it will be right at home in the graduate seminar. Engagingly written and filled with interestingly detail, it can also be easily excerpted for undergraduate syllabi and will also be of interest and of value to non-academic jazz fans.
References
Morton, Brian and Richard Cook. 2010. The Penguin Jazz Guide: The History of the Music in the 1,001 Best Albums. London: Penguin Books.
Yanow, Scott. 2003. Jazz on Record: The First Sixty Years. San Francisco: Backbeat Books.
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