Kosher jammers: Jewish Connections in Jazz. Vol.1: The USA
by Mike Gerber
Vinyl Vanguard, £19.99

AS I grew into jazz in my teens and twenties, I had many jazz heroes. Some of them were east Londoners, but what I didn’t realise at that time was that their roots were Jewish, and learning the ordeals of their people throughout the first half of the 20th century made me love them even more. Favourite clarinetists like Stepney’s Monty Sunshine or Bow’s Cy Laurie, rampaging saxophonists like Ronnie Scott who had grown up with his uncle who fought at the Battle of Cable Street — it seemed that, in Britain too as well as in the US, jazz and the struggle against racism were synonymous.

No writer has done more to make this connection explicit than the London journalist and record store owner, Mike Gerber, whose first pioneering book, Jazz Jews, was published in 2010. Now he has extended his research to delve even more deeply into these links, starting with the US, and Kosher Jammers is the result.

Gerber is a profoundly original writer who writes as he speaks. His text is not only serious scholarship, but informal, conversational and full of surprises. This makes his interviews with musicians, record company bosses, musicians' managers, impresarios and jazz festival organisers speak with the exigencies of real life, so that his book is a succession of voices across the US, and if you love jazz or even have little more than a marginal interest in it, you will not want to put his book down.

Gerber maintains that “Jews like many others found inspiration in the sounds of black America” from jazz's earliest days in 1900s New Orleans. He traces the relationship between jazz, the blues and Jewish liturgical cantorial chanting, returning to this theme many times throughout his book.

He quotes bandleader Artie Shaw, whose popular success as a white jazz big band maestro was only surpassed by Benny Goodman, in a 2002 interview, two years before he died: “Being Jewish has everything to do with everything you are, in a society that is very abhorrent of Jews,” he told him. This statement haunts Gerber’s book.

Yet where would jazz have gone without the majority of Jewish composers who created the American Songbook? Gershwin? Jerome Kern? Richard Rodgers? Johnny Green? The melodies and starting points of I Got Rhythm, Body and Soul, My Funny Valentine or All The Things You Are became the food of jazz, played and recorded thousands of times by the music’s greatest virtuosi of the mid-20th century, from Armstrong to Coleman Hawkins, from Miles Davis to John Coltrane, who played and recorded Rodgers’ My Favourite Things time and time again.

But the real power of Gerber’s book is in its conversations. He knows just the right questions to ask. His interview with the great bop drummer and ex-heavyweight boxer, Stan Levey, for example, remembers his 1940s days with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and drums genius Max Roach with tremendous wit and vibrancy, and the same is true of dozens of exchanges he has throughout his book.

His writing travels through all the jazz genres, from New Orleans, to swing, to bop, post-bop, free improvisation and the Radical Jewish Culture movement led by New Yorker John Zorn. As a reader you marvel at the sheer number of interviewees he managed to trace and sit down with across the US — and this is but the first volume, with a second tome exploring the British and European connections yet to come.

In the meantime, if you want to be a continuing part of his interlocutions, visit Vinyl Vanguard, his small but throbbing record store in Walthamstow, east London. You’ll probably come away not only with his book but a few marvellous sounds too, and plenty of encouragement to support and add your weight to the Palestinian struggle. For Gerber knows well that jazz is the soundtrack of undiminished freedom and justice for all of us.