The historical biography has come to be viewed with suspicion by those who recognize that the genre's literary emplotment and narrative demands can waylay the scholarly search for objective historical 'truth. ' This article explores these biographical narrative conventions and applications-and proposes new approaches to researching and writing within the biographical format-in the context of historical jazz studies. The piece begins by considering, with reference to several biographies of the saxophonist John Coltrane, both the ways that biographical narratives are constituted from disparate source materials and the ideological agendas and political problems that attend this creative act. The article argues that, in the course of doing biographical work, these issues might begin to be accounted for and dealt with by rethinking of the nature of historical-biographical 'research, ' and by way of hermeneutic, historical-dialogical method of the kind outlined by Hans-Georg Gadamer; with a theoretical approach delineated (and with reference to the author's own experiences as a jazz biographer), the article goes on to engage with the processes and politics of this research stage, discussing oral history fieldwork and its textual representation, placing special emphasis on encounters of race so often inherent to jazz research and writing. Finally, the piece returns to the act of biographical writing itself, and outlines what, in light of the foregoing discussion, might be considered as new aims, values and strategies for the jazz biographical narrative, and perhaps for biography more generally.

Before WWII, Hugues Panassié (1912–1974) was Europe's leading critical authority on jazz, and by the time of his death he had published a dozen books on jazz music and been President of the Hot-club de France for over 40 years. Yet despite this life's worth of efforts made in jazz's name, Panassié's reputation is no longer a good one: pointing to the fantasies of black exceptionalism and Noble Savagery present in his work, historians have tended to dismiss the critic as a racist primitivist, one in thrall to that contemporarynegrophiliemost familiar today from early-century Parisian visual art. Indeed Panassié used the term ‘primitive’ himself, and positively. But this article traces the ultra-conservative writer's intellectual and religious formation to show that, rather than contemporarynegrophilie, it was a religious and cultural heritage quite distant from the modern European encounter with blackness that first informed Panassié's primitivism. Although this re-reading does not aim to ‘rehabilitate’ someone who remains a troublesome and reactionary figure, the article nevertheless goes on to explore how, in his primitivist rejection of European modernism, Panassié sometimes pre-empts important arguments made by the postmodern jazz scholarship that would seem to marginalise the critic's historical contributions.

This article takes an imagined, transnational living room as its setting, examining jazz's place in representations of the 'modern' middle-class home across the post-war West, and exploring the domestic uses that listeners both casual and committed made of the music in recorded form. In magazines as apparently diverse as Ideal Home in the UK and Playboy in the US, a certain kind of jazz helped mark a new middlebrow connoisseurship in the 1950s and 60s. Yet rather than simply locating the style in a historical sociology of taste, this piece attempts to describe jazz's role in what was an emergent middle-class sensorium. The music's sonic characteristics were frequently called upon to complement the newly sleek visual and tactile experiences -of furniture, fabrics, plastics, the light and space of modern domestic architecture -then coming to define the aspirational bourgeois home; an international modern visual aesthetic was reflected back in jazz album cover art. But to describe experience or ambience represents a challenge to historical method. As much as history proper, then, it's through a kind of experimental criticism of both music and visual culture that this piece attempts to capture the textures and moods that jazz brought to the postwar home.

Contemporary music historians have shown how taxonomic divisions of humanityconstructed in earnest within

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