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.