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Roger Pryor Dodge
1898 – 1974
Man in the White Costume, 1934
Costume & choreography by Roger Pryor Dodge
Music: East St. Louis Toodle-oo by Duke Ellington
Photo: DeCamp Studio, New York
Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance
Roger Pryor Dodge
Oxford University Press, 368 pp., 1995
The collected writings, from 1929-1964, were selected and edited by Pryor Dodge, son of the author. Introduction by Dan Morgenstern, Director, Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. Preface by Pryor Dodge.
Long before Martin Williams, Gene Lees, or Gunther Schuller, Roger Pryor Dodge was writing seriously about jazz. A ballet, vaudeville, and jazz dancer, Dodge turned his critical attention to the music in the 1920's, helping to build the respect jazz has long since achieved. Now, for the first time, the essays and reviews of one of America's first great jazz critics have been collected in one volume. Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance gathers over thirty years of Dodge's writing, from 1929 to 1964, offering a remarkable chronicle of the changing music and one writer's ever-growing appreciation of it.
The classically trained Dodge came to jazz in the early 1920's; he quickly developed a love for the authentic, non-commerical sounds of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, and scores of lesser-known musicians. His work was often provocative, placing him at odds with prevailing attitudes. In these essays, we share highly personal yet professional encounters with the music – including a moving profile of "Bubber" Miley ("the greatest trumpeter in jazz history – in fact, the greatest musician of them all"), who died of tuberculosis at age thirty. Dodge ranges across the musical spectrum, from the Cuban sexteto to the blues of Leadbelly.

Roger Pryor Dodge with "Bubber" Miley, 1931, performing to "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" by Duke Ellington
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