Singing Jazz:
The Singers and Their Styles
by Bruce Crowther and Mike Pinfold
Reviewed by Phillip D. Atteberry
This material is copyrighted and was originally published in The Mississippi Rag.
Of more interest is the focus on jazz singing as a career--how career challenges have changed over the years and how various singers have struggled to adapt. Comments by Susannah McCorkle, Wesla Whitfield, Lucy Reed, Annie Ross and a host of others are interesting, but presented in little morsels here and there, making it difficult—as a reader—to gain momentum.
In short, the parts of this book are greater than its whole. I can imagine myself referring to it often (the directory of jazz singers at the end is more thorough than any I’ve seen), but this isn’t a book that most people will enjoy reading from cover to cover. To paraphrase badly the English poet John Donne, some books are merely to be tasted, others nibbled at, and others thoroughly devoured. This is a nibbling kind of a book, the kind you are glad to have when life gives you twenty minutes of idle time.