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Some Hustling This! Taking Jazz to the World, 1914-1929.

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Some Hustling This! Taking Jazz to the World, 1914-1929. By Mark Miller. Toronto: The Mercury Press, 2005. [207 p. ISBN 1-55128-119-8. $19.95] Bibliography, index, photographs.

This is the latest in an impressive series of books by Mark Miller, the jazz critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail. His earlier monographs include The Miller Companion to Jazz in Canada and Canadians in Jazz (Toronto: Mercury Press, 2001), Such Melodious Racket: The Lost History of Jazz in Canada, 1914-1949 (Toronto: Mercury Press, 1997), and Cool Blues: Charlie Parker in Canada, 1953 (London, ON: Nightwood Editions, 1989), among others. Miller has also written for Down Beat, Coda, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, and other publications.

Four years of research and writing went into this project, which Miller describes as "the product of a much longer interest in the lost, the forgotten and the overlooked in jazz history" (p. 9). As he explains,

The theoretical implications [of] early exposure to, and contact with, American jazz musicians [abroad] have become a popular subject for critical analysis, bringing together ... the interrelated cultural and sociological themes of modernism, primitivism, exoticism, racism, identity and "otherness." ... Missing from this body of writing, however, is a basic account of who went where, when, and did what. (p. 11)

Beginning with the first trip of singer-drummer Louis Mitchell to Europe in 1914 with the Southern Symphony Quintette (a ragtime ensemble), and closing with the precipitous demise of a...

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