A seriously misleading error has crept into almost all the literature on the origins of New Orleans jazz. The error mistakenly attributes to the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s a significant role in the formation of the city's jazz tradition.

Jazz historians have done a reasonably good job of depicting the two black communities that existed in new Orleans from the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 until the twentieth century. One community comprised a French-speaking Catholic group who lived mostly in downtown New Orleans, i.e. the area of the city down-river from Canal Street. Before the Civil War this group, commonly called Creoles, or Black Creoles, but more accurately called Franco-Africans, comprised free people of colour as well as slaves, and after the war consisted of their descendants who perpetuated the group's language, religion and musical tradition, which combined French, African and Caribbean elements.

Members of the other black community were English-speaking Protestants who lived mostly in uptown new Orleans. That group, before the Civil War, was made up largely of slaves brought to New Orleans by Americans who flooded into Louisiana after the 1803 Purchase, though it also included some free people of colour. After the war, the descendants of these immigrants continued their language, religion and musical tradition, which came mostly from the rural South. There Anglo-Africans were generally less prosperous and less educated than the downtown Franco-African or Creole community.

Daniel Chandler and Meic Llewellyn of the Department of Education at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, nearly achieved the impossible in their construction of the Identities in Action conference. By allowing for the free interweaving of several identity discourses over a tantalisingly brief weekend, they provided a practical forum for the sympathetic mutual understanding of the studies of cultural- and self-identities, marginalised communities, minority languages, and gender and queer studies. Each block of time was organised into four different ‘strands’ which then culminated in workshops and discussion sessions: Music and Identities, Cyberspace and Identities, Organisational Identities; Identities and Place, Gender Identities, Political Action and Identities; Queer Theory and Gay Identities, Museum of the Future, Children's Identities and the Media; Language and Identities, Personal Identities, Representations and Identities. The unfortunate fact of such an undertaking is the time restriction imposed upon it. Had the conference lasted even a full five days, we may have seen not only the formation of imagined communities, but intriguing societal developments between them.

The Festival International de Jazz de Montréal (Montreal International Jazz Festival), which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 1999, has become one of the most popular music festivals in the world, attracting in just twelve days more than a million and a half people. Most visitors are Canadians and Americans, but Europeans are attending in greater numbers each year.

The first Festival, held in the summer of 1979, lasted less than a week. Since then, it has progressively expanded and has moved from one site to another several times to accommodate the growing number of visitors. At its current site in downtown Montreal, in the neighbourhood of the Place des Arts, it now lasts a full twelve days. In 1998, thirty-six concert series and two film series were offered for a total of 411 events. Of these, 103 were paying concerts, and 298 were free concerts held for the most part out of doors. Jazz presented in more than twelve bars all over the city also forms part of the event.

From noon to 6 pm, a free outdoor concert is held every hour. From 6 pm to midnight, two more free concerts are performed simultaneously. During the day, street bands give strollers a taste of a wide range of musical styles. For more than twelve hours the public can hear music nonstop by moving from one venue to the other. The downtown site is big enough to avoid the overlapping of music from simultaneous performances. At the end of the afternoon and in the evening, Festival-goers can enjoy the indoor paying concerts.

Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender.Edited by Sheila Whiteley. London and New York: Routeledge, 1997, 353 pp.

Sex, sexuality and articulations of gender are well-established components in the production and performance of popular music. Hence, Sexing the Groove, edited by Sheila Whiteley, is a very welcome addition to this vital and growing area of popular music studies and cultural theory more generally. The collection reflects the reality that studies of gender and sexuality in popular music are born of a hybrid lineage; accordingly the book approaches its subject from a range of disciplines such as sociology, cultural theory, media studies, sychology and musicology, and as such is a vibrant mix. Despite its relative diversity, the book's structure and progression is fluent and focused.

The aim of this annual Popular Music bibliography is to provide a record of recent books on popular music and to offer brief, sometimes critical guidance to them whenever possible. Coverage is restricted to books and some booklets (with the exception of important yearbooks and some special issues of journals) and includes revised editions as well as notable reissues. Omitted are translations of books previously published in English except those which include some significant additions.