Jazz in the Hill: Nightlife and Narratives of a Pittsburgh Neighborhood

Guitarist and ethnomusicologist Harper’s (Univ. at Buffalo) book ranks as one of the first comprehensive studies of jazz music and its role in the community life of Pittsburgh’s predominantly Black Hill District. Jazz was ascendant in the clubs frequented by Black and Brown people from the 1920s through the ’60s, including the Crawford Grill (1943–2003) and Hurricane Bar (1954–70). The Crawford was the city’s preeminent jazz stop, where Miles, Mingus, and Blakey performed, while Jimmy Smith and Ramsey Lewis played at the Hurricane, an organ/piano bar second to none. But from the 1950s on, the Black Hill District was under assault from urban development projects, which undermined local efforts to retain its neighborhood feel, Harper writes. He discusses the efforts of Local 471 (one of the U.S.’s oldest labor unions for Black musicians) to avoid being swamped when it was integrated into predominantly white Local 60 in 1966. The least successful part of the book is when it attempts to invoke theory to explain the area’s nightlife—Henri Lefebvre’s thinking about physical spaces as actors in human life and Saidiya Hartman’s observations of Black intimate life. Though apt, the theory is awkwardly integrated into the book.