The
SCCJ has made its own headlines in recent years, both for the arrest of several high-profile handball players accused of match fixing, and for an internal scandal linked to a Parisian casino called the Cercle Wagram which led to the removal of several officers.
The SCCJ has been revised several times since it first appeared, but the edition I first used was an album of six LPs containing about five hours of musical selections arranged pretty much chronologically from Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag," recorded in 1916, to John Coltrane's "Alabama" of 1963.
I gradually began to find pedagogical problems in using the SCCJ. And gradually I could see how, wonderful as it was, it was a result of the same cultural disposition that had produced the books by Leavis and Hodeir.
Beginning jazz history at the beginning, say with "Dippermouth Blues" recorded by King Oliver in 1923 (the earliest instrumental on the SCCJ), means listening to an unfamiliar and complex idiom through the dense fog of primitive recording technology.
Over the years I, and many other people, could see the conscious and unconscious prejudices of the SCCJ: Martin Williams clearly privileged contemporary critical opinion over popular appeal.