Reviews for Crisis in child mental health

The average rating for Crisis in child mental health based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-12-14 00:00:00 Jeffrey Keeney The late Jim Godbolt, for decades a legendary musician and jazz writer in London, published the first edition of A History of Jazz in Britain 1919-50 in 1984. Built from his immense personal knowledge of British jazz music and musicians and from the pages of Melody Maker (the world’s first great critical jazz publication) Godbolt’s history offers a close look at the development of a jazz culture in Great Britain through the eyes of its aficionados and critics. Godbolt was among the first to attempt writing a history of jazz anywhere in Europe, so he deserves credit for that. However, the book does contain a number of obvious flaws. First, the author provides no context whatsoever for the arrival of American jazz on British shores in 1919. What was the cultural setting in England before jazz arrived? Second, his analytical scope is quite narrow. His reliance on extensive quotations from Melody Maker often leaves his own critical analysis thin. Finally, the book includes neither citations nor a bibliography. Godbolt often ignores broader historical context and analysis in favor of specific (but always fascinating) stories. Indeed, one could view the book as a history of Melody Maker itself, since Godbolt painted fine portraits of key writers and editors like Spike Hughes and Edgar Jackson—a man at first “virulently” antagonistic to black jazz who became one of its biggest promoters. The book also has a number of strengths. For one, Godbolt demonstrates the importance of British musicians in a reciprocal transatlantic cultural exchange. While early British jazz musicians relied on their more advanced American counterparts for new songs as well as lessons in technique, Godbolt highlights the critical role publications like Melody Maker played developing a culture that could support both touring American musicians and homegrown jazz bands. Godbolt explains, for example, that Louis Armstrong’s long-awaited visits to England in the early 1930s were both a success and a failure. Armstrong relied on the support of local musicians for his European shows, but the lack of quality jazz British musicians left Armstrong carrying most of the performance load, ultimately leaving the trumpeter with a scarred lip. Despite a few critical reviews that he was too commercial, Armstrong’s shows attracted large British audiences. Much more than broadcast media, Godbolt shows, publications like Melody Maker and Rhythm brought musician and fans together through reviews, schedule notes, and show promotions. The groundswell of support based in dialogue between critics and fans helped ensure that Armstrong left England a star. Though occasionally superficial in his analysis, Godbolt also demonstrates the importance of transatlantic business connections to the history of jazz culture. Jazz came to Europe, he writes, simply on the basis of “booking agents seeking new ‘acts’,” not in response to a pre-existing public demand. Moreover, many independent British record companies had deals with American labels that forced them to press and distribute American records their own editorial boards would have rejected. Though he never says it explicitly, Godbolt also demonstrates that jazz arrived in Britain primarily as a commercial entity by highlighting how national protectionism--so common among other industries--helped produce a home-grown jazz community (and economy). When in 1935 the Ministry of Labor noted an imbalance between American musicians in England and British musicians performing in America, it halted issuing permits to American bands like Duke Ellington’s until “satisfactory reciprocal arrangements were made with the American Federation of Musicians.” Godbolt called the ban, which lasted an astonishing 19 years, a “cultural iron curtain.” But by the time a deal was finally struck in 1954, Great Britain had developed a number of its own sophisticated jazz performance subcultures, supported by native record shops, record companies, and municipalities. These analyses are as much my own as Godbolt's. He is more interested in chronicling what happened (limiting permits to bands like Ellington until reciprocal arrangements were made) than analyzing what that could mean (the relationship between the two nations vis a vis jazz was primarily commercial and only secondarily cultural). In sum, the book will interest and satisfy many readers. For Americans, the story of jazz abroad is not one we tend to focus on, especially not in the timeframe covered in this book. At the same time, the book's serious limitations in citations and analysis limits its usefulness to historians.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-09-19 00:00:00 Robert Sorrow Dear God, where to start with this thing. Well, how about where the book does: the introduction. In this section Larkin admits that more than half of the jazz record-review columns contained herein were written before he was willing to confess to the public that he hated Charlie Parker, bebop, and its descendants, and thus pretty much everything new after the second world war. Presumably if he had admitted that when he started the column in 1961 the record companies would not have sent him free records. So by Larkin's own admission, more than half of this book is him being not entirely honest about his opinions. He reviews several Parker reissues during this section and is always respectful, so knowing what we know we can only wonder how full of shit he is in the other reviews in this first part. At least he does not pretend to like John Coltrane, and spews venom at him at just about every opportunity, including an obituary of sorts upon Coltrane's death (in place of the standard publication date, the end of this piece is marked "unpublished." Thank God for editors). It's a bit of a crisis for me here because, though I think far more highly of Coltrane than Larkin did, he does manage to nail every single one of my reservations with the man's music, just with 1000% more bile than I ever could think of generating. Sadly the first, at least partly dishonest, section is the best. Once Larkin and his gravy train of free records are established, he lets loose on all and sundry and it's just depressing, regardless of whether you share his opinions or not. I am not especially concerned with his opinions for the most part, they are what they are, and what one loves is what one loves. But every single piece is laden with some bizarre statement, some peculiar logical fallacy, some contradiction of what he says elsewhere that, combined with much of his enthusiasm being reserved for compilations of old 78s, compilations which were probably available less than a year in the 60s, that this volume's musical commentary is virtually useless. (But as for opinions ... I like Muggsy Spanier very much, revere his 1939/40 records with his own band and Sidney Bechet, but the frequency with which Larkin holds him up as an examplar beggars belief. It makes Whitney Balliett's Catlett fixation look under control. And what is one to make of his statement that no one could possibly prefer 'A Day in the Life' to 'I Want to Hold Your Hand'?) Troubling above all of this, though, is that Larkin is just a flat-out racist. More than once he comments that jazz is at its best as a meeting of black and white musicians (when even the great trumpeter Roy Eldridge admitted defeat when Leonard Feather challenged him in a blindfold test to prove his assertion that one could tell the race of the player by music alone). He frequently tries his hardest to avoid giving the black race full credit if it can be avoided. Black jazz musicians' support for the civil rights movement is bemoaned repeatedly, with Larkin at one point throwing in "Little Rock" as a preoccupation deserving of dismissal in the manner that one might say the Kardashians are today. He cites "kill whitey" sentiments more than once but refuses to be specific about where he has heard such things. In discussion of the avant garde, Danish-born John Tchicai gets a pass because he was born in Europe and thus does not feel that civil rights nonsense like the others who play alongside him on Coltrane's Ascension do. It's frequent and depressing in that cavalier colonialist mindset that one, unfortunately, is not surprised to find in an arch-conservative writer in country who thrilled to a TV programme called "The Black and White Minstrel Show" for many years after the last of these pieces was written. I considered giving this two stars because Larkin writes well enough that I almost made it to the end without skimming in spite of all of the above, but fuck Philip Larkin. If you can read this book without wanting to rip up that cover image, you are a much better person than I.