THIS is a marvellous book. Part social document, part personal reminiscence, part chronicle of cultural accretion, it's like a fossil record of native American musical history in the 20th century, with jazz as a kind of magma filtering into other layers of the country's life. Once, it even erupted and spread, lava-like, over everything else. That was the Swing Era, when Goodman was king, a clarinet was a licorice stick and musicians who learned the ways of the world working in mobsters' clubs were suddenly media stars. Then innovation turned into formula and, like lava, cooled, solidified and was forgotten. And jazz once more receded beneath the surface.
It's this curious duality that gives so much force to Gottlieb's wonderful collection of writing on the music. From it emerges the incidental details of lives and forms whose richness was often obscured by poverty and racism. Jelly Roll Morton, the self-proclaimed inventor of jazz, worked in turn-of-the- century Mississippi delta sporting houses, earning the nickname of "Wining Boy" for his sexual prowess (a colleague, Johnny St Cyr, prudishly embarrassed, elaborated that it should be "Winding Boy", an expression referring to hip movements in dancing or sex).
What these disparate anecdotes have in common is that Morton and Hawes came from "respectable" family backgrounds; they were comparatively well educated, but in settling for jazz immediately became part of a substratum frowned on by the nine-to-fives - whenever these proper people thought of it, which was usually only when some jazz person was busted for drugs or hit the headlines for some other manifestation of low life. Jazz was like membership of a secret or semi-secret society where class meant little and initiates mixed in a kind of comfort zone.
If that were all there was to it, Gottlieb's book would be merely mildly interesting. But the autobiographical section, full of voices from the inside, includes the words of Morton and Hawes, as well as the recollections and opinions, often forcefully expressed, of players such as Ellington, Basie, Eddie Condon, Hoagy Carmichael, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor. And they give a sense that in playing jazz they had a grip on some kind of truth essential to them. The music was important.
That's partly why jazz, a child of the 20th century, had staying power. It's also why writers - some very good - took the time to know the music and its practitioners and to spread the gospel.
Gottlieb has put some of the best into the book's reportage section.
And it is also why, almost from the start, the music accumulated critical credibility. And with the critics are names which might surprise some. Historian Eric Hobsbawm, for example, who used the nom de plume Francis Newton, after a trumpeter he admired, when he wrote on jazz; the poet and novelist, Philip Larkin, as often magnificently wrong-headed as he was right; or Dudley Moore, an excellent jazz pianist before he went to Hollywood, whose article on Errol Garner is brilliant.
And it is here that the book, in a way, comes full circle. Moore is a musician, and it is usually these who have the most authority and insight when writing on jazz. People like Humphrey Lyttelton, the garrulous Benny Green, or the controversial historian and saxophonist, James Lincoln Collier, arecritics who speak from both inside the community and, through the act of writing about the music, from outside it. And Gottlieb has done justice to them all.
Ray Comiskey is an Irish Times staff journalist.