Liner note bingo

[ghost of miles]

19 minutes ago, Big Beat Steve said:

What do you mean - "pedestrian"?

Remember the era and the target group of these books.
I have "The Collector's Jazz - Traditional and Swing" (1958), bought on a whim through eBay in a job lot of papers. Sure, it is no "All Music Guide to Jazz" thing - but could there have been in the 50s? To be honest, I find it quite in the tradition of "The Jazz Record Book" (Smith and Ramsey, 1943), and certainly other guides such as "Jazz on 78" and "Jazz on LP" issued as a (obviously biased ) guide by the Decca Group were not more enlightening overall. Products of their time but interesting time capsules anyway as they allow us to observe how the recordings were seen then. Come to think of it, and browsing through that "Traditional and Swing" volume right now, I find some of Wilson's comments on the artists and recordings quite enriching as well as amusing as they put things into perspective (at times a quite candid one).
That said, and as for "pedestrian", if OTOH you can give me a hint on the existence of an "overdrive top gear jet-age motoring" record guide from those late 50s (catering to a similiar public) then please do let me know and I will go out of my way to source a copy for my "old paper collection".

 Not meaning to diss your John S. Wilson record guides!  I just recall glancing through them at IU’s music library to see what he had to say about a couple of artists/albums for a show I was working on (and for which contemporaneous accounts/reviews were scant). Later writers such as Max Harrison have spoiled me, no doubt. And yes, I definitely get the interest of in-the-historical-moment perceptions and accounts (that’s why John Gunther’s Inside U.S.A. piqued my curiosity, as a portrait of the country in the immediate aftermath of World War II). And I confess to having less knowledge than I should of pre-1970 jazz record guides, so not aware of others that might have been circulating in the late 1950s.

[Big Beat Steve]

Take out the Traditional to Swing guide if you should ever do a(nother?) radio set on the heyday of the Lionel Hampton BIG BAND and read up on what Wilson (et tu, Brute ... ). had to say about the Hampton big band then.

(Sorry, we are getting off-topic )

[ghost of miles]

On 9/3/2020 at 11:32 PM, Larry Kart said:

John Gunther is a semi-forgotten author-journalist who wrote a series of once popular "Inside" books about foreign countries and regions.

A little less semi-forgotten after Robert Gottlieb's piece about Gunther and Inside USA appeared in the New York Times two days ago:

Robert Gottlieb On The Man Who Saw America (And We Mean, All Of It)