First Edition. Original pictorial wrapper, 16 pp.illustrations and ads + 48pp. illustrated text. Extensively illustrated with photographs and caricature drawings, including a front cover drawing of Duke Ellington, “greatest living exponent of the jazz idiom.”
Rare. WorldCat locates only one copy in an American institution.
13 articles by Hugues Panassie, et al, including “Bessie Smith”, “New Orleans and the Chicago Style”, a Discography of Benny Goodman, and – notably - what may be the earliest reprint of Cab Calloway’s classic “Cat-o-logue / Hepsters Dictionary” of Jazz lingo, first issued that year in the US in tiny pamphlet form and now a prized collectible of Jazz aficionados.
Australia’s early passion for Jazz is often overlooked by historians, but two years before the world’s first Jazz Festival of “international significance”, held in Nice, France in 1948 – which itself predated the Newport Festival by 6 years and the Monterey Festival by 10 – there was an Australian Jazz Convention in Melbourne in December 1946.
