Such Melodious Racket traces, for the first time, the introduction, dissemination and early development of jazz in Canada. Beginning with the appearances in vaudeville of a pioneering New Orleans ensemble, the Creole Band, in 1914, and concluding with Oscar Peterson's celebrated US debut at Carnegie Hall in 1949, the book documents the activities both of the Americans who brought this audacious new music to Canada? the legendary Jelly Roll Morton not least among them? and of the Canadians who soon took jazz for their own. This fascinating study is based on extensive archival research, as well as interviews with more than seventy musicians? many now in their seventies or eighties? and includes numerous rare and wonderful photographs.

Mark Miller served as the jazz critic for The Globe and Mail from 1978 to 2005 and, in addition to A Certain Respect for Tradition, has completed six other books since 1982, including Such Melodious Racket: The Lost History of Jazz in Canada, 1914-1949 (1997), The Miller Companion to Jazz in Canada (2001), and Some Hustling This!: Taking Jazz to the World, 1914-1929 (2005) (all Mercury). He has also written for several popular and scholarly publications, notably Coda, Down Beat, the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. His photographs of jazz musicians have been published widely.

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