NONFICTION - Feb. 21, 1993

THE JAZZ SCENE by Eric Hobsbawm (Pantheon Books: $25; 392 pp.). Jazz music, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune of 1918, is “the indecent story syncopated and counterpointed.” The newspaper intended censure, of course, but in fact that’s not a bad definition of a major thread in the jazz skein--the hidden thought, the spontaneous feeling, captured, transformed, celebrated. These last few words will no doubt cause the author of “The Jazz Scene” to cringe, for Eric Hobsbawm, a distinguished British historian, is more interested in examining jazz culture than exalting it. He does so in near-scholarly detail, tracing not just the development of jazz in the United States but its business practices and relationship to other, more widely accepted arts. “The Jazz Scene” works nicely as an introductory jazz text, being both authoritative and accessible; its principal drawback is creakiness, since the bulk of the book was first published (under a pseudonym, no less) in 1959. Hobsbawm’s history is better than his sociology--his generalizations about race show ‘50s naivete--but that’s a minor concern, given his loving knowledge of jazz and eye for revealing anecdotes. One presumes they are true: Doubt is sown by the discrepancy between Hobsbawm’s two tellings of a story dating from 1944. In the first instance, a surrendering German lieutenant is quoted as asking his captors whether anyone collected the records of Benny Goodman, while in the second the lieutenant asks for fans of Count Basie.