A Philosophy of Cover Songs. By P.D. Magnus. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2022. 145 pp. ISBN 978-1-800-64422-9

Abstract

ating their own performance spaces. The New York ‘Loft Jazz Scene’ of the 1970s and 1980s was one such example. Such musicians have certainly found greater favour in mainland Europe than at home, but these African American musicians – and younger, often white American musicians – have continued to play free jazz. The point is that failure to attend to the who, what, when, where, how and why makes for arid and even inaccurate history. Of course, historians may justifiably widen the scope of inquiry and must seek to understand and interpret the ‘facts’ in terms of the ‘larger historical and cultural contexts’. However, context applies to one’s own work, not just to writers outside one’s own approach. As E.H. Carr (1987, p. 30) noted, history is ‘a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past’. But Carr did not accept that all views of the past were equally valid: ‘It does not follow that because a mountain appears to take on a different shape from different angles of vision, it has objectively no shape at all or an infinity of shapes’ (Carr 1987, pp. 27–8). It is the mountain – the music and those who made it what it is and what we know of it – that is unfortunately missing from Jazz Diaspora.