My sister has always bought and still buys me the best birthday and Christmas presents. She understands my tastes and obsessions culture wise better than anybody and always chooses the greatest gifts. I sometimes take a while in playing the records, watching the films and reading the books she gives me but I always get there in the end. This is a book she gave me for Christmas in 1997 and I'm just getting round to reading it now.
It's Barney Hoskyn's lavish and wonderfully written musical history of LA. Hoskyns is an excellent writer. Skirting the realms of academia in terms of his research and depth but always remaining thoroughly entertaining as well as readable at one and the same time. The first twenty five pages of Waiting For the Sun detail the LA of the Forties and Fifties focusing mainly on the Golden Ages of Jazz and R&B.
The Jazz pages are a roll call of cool. Miles, Bird, Art Pepper, Chet Baker, Ornette and the like. But Hoskins finds time to highlight the inherent contradictions of LA the main theme of his book. The light and the darkness, the sun and the night. The fact that it's a city grounded in racism, white supremacy, fear and hatred. Nat King Cole, who lived there had burning crosses planted on his lawn. Instead of Nat though, we'll start with Esther Mae Jones.
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