Ian Thomson

Godfather of rap

  • The Last Holiday: A Memoir

    Gil Scott-Heron

    Canongate, pp. 319

At a funeral in New Orleans in 1901, Joe ‘King’ Oliver played a blues-drenched dirge on the trumpet. This was the new music they would soon call jazz. A century on, from the hothouse stomps of Duke Ellington to the angular doodlings of Thelonious Monk, jazz survives in the vocal inflections of rap.

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