Focusing primarily on one figure or group of musicians for each year of the decade, Shoemaker looks at British and European musicians, including Han Bennink, Peter Brötzmann, Albert Mangelsdorff, Chris McGregor, John Stevens, Derek Bailey, and Evan Parker. Major American figures profiled are Julius Hemphill, Anthony Braxton, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, and Sam Rivers. Shoemaker also discusses jazz criticism and the jazz canon, jazz festivals, and jazz at the White House. His explorations of the music and “scenes” of the musicians are thorough. This is a well-written and important book.



Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

Choice Reviews

In this informative, opinionated history, Shoemaker, a longtime jazz writer and critic, breaks down the 1970s by devoting each chapter of the book to a specific year. After the 1960s—a decade Shoemaker hails as the genre’s most pivotal—jazz was at a crossroads and seeking a new identity. Although jazz in the 1970s is often associated with the word “fusion,” it headed in multiple directions. Shoemaker focuses on what he believes are the decade’s important albums, including saxophonist Julius Hemphill’s Dogon A.D. and Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Nice Guys, plus the establishment of major events such as the Montreux Jazz Festival and Jimmy Carter’s one-off White House Jazz Picnic. At times, this selective history reads like a series of lengthy record reviews interspersed with DownBeat and Melody Maker reviews from the era, accompanied by overwritten prose (“Increasingly, Marsalis’s subsequent recordings combine aspects of reverse engineering and discredited recapitulation theories in biology, which posits that an organism’s development resembles the series of ancestral types”). That said, Shoemaker does provide insight into major and independent record labels and the impact that sampler releases such as The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz had on avant-garde and mainstream listeners. Shoemaker writes for the jazz connoisseur, and his work will disappoint mainstream readers in search of a more complete overview of this era of jazz. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Shoemaker’s work has two great strengths: rapid response and sense of detail befitting a journalist, coupled with a historian’s sense of scale and long view.

The New York City Jazz Record

Bill Shoemaker examines a jazz decade when cultures collided and coalesced, then moved on. He shows what these processes meant for the music's future, while unfalteringly bringing the reader to some unsuspected conclusions. Revelatory, responsive and inspiring.

Val Wilmer, author, As Serious as Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz

Can we make sense of the reality that was jazz in the 1970s? The answer is yes. In this brilliantly researched book, Bill Shoemaker sorts out the layers of Afro-American self-determination, European identity, the market, and even Jimmy Carter’s great jazz event at the White House.

Matthew Shipp, pianist and composer

Bill Shoemaker’s Jazz in the 1970’s: Diverging Streams is a rich read. You'll want to listen to the music as you follow the stories of the musicians, the business, and the dynamic interplay with history, culture, politics, and economic forces.

Mark Dresser, bassist, composer, and professor, University of California San Diego