New Books In Music

Kathy Sloane‘s Keystone Korner: Portrait of a Jazz Club (Indiana UP, 2011) captures a time and place in San Francisco in the 70s and early 80s that we may never see again. Owner/impresario/musician Todd Barkan ran the club on a frayed financial shoestring, but the club’s unique ambience in San Francisco’s North Beach beckoned the greatest jazz players, where jazz aficionados and neophytes alike could appreciate America’s great cultural art form. Sloane’s fabulous black and white photographs of jazz players such as Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Betty Carter, Elvin Jones, Mary Lou Williams, Bobby Hutcherson, McCoy Tyner, and countless others range from the contemplative to the kinetic – and they all tell a story. Sloane arranges chapters thematically with titles familiar to jazz lovers like Bright Moments, Bobby and Bags and Teach Me Tonight. In each chapter, the Keystone family of employees, patrons and the players tell stories and reminisce as to what made