Donald Clarke’s vast listening experience goes back to his early childhood days in the 40s in Kenosha, Wisconsin; the music he heard on the radio as he played on the floor while his mother did the ironing gradually became the “most important thing in the world” to him.

The tone of his new book is that of a most loyal supporter who “never stopped buying records”, writing from the heart about the best things in popular music and his regrets that “nowadays, popular music is dominated by technology and chosen for us by lawyers and accountants who seem to be tone-deaf. The music business has always chased fads and has always been dominated by greed, but nowadays, like the US government, it is out of control and would appear to be heading for the wall.”

It is quite remarkable that while this sort of commentary is scattered throughout, it remains a most engaging and well focused book. As in his previous two books The Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music (1989) - which last year won the C B Oldman Award for the best British music reference book - and Wishing on the Moon - the Life and Times of Billie Holiday, Clarke manages to bring the story of popular music to the present and seeks consistently to link various aspects of it with the larger social and historical context.

But his success mainly lies in the accuracy and the breadth of knowledge with which these volumes are packed. The present volume is a selection of 19 essays following a historical pattern; the style is often encyclopedic but not without subtlety of analysis and novelty of insight. With its extensive bibliography, long, but, unfortunately, “names only” index, and thorough investigation of genre and personalities, this is a good reference book for the student of a wide range of subjects related to popular music and a very entertaining book for those with any sort of interest in popular contemporary arts.

The title and presentation of the book might mislead; this “historical survey”, as declared in the preface, is not confined to the period many of us automatically associate with popular music: Broadway musicals to today’s pop. In fact, the first chapter is devoted to a survey of all types of music that the author attempts to distinguish as the popular alternative to “serious” music from AD 900 to the beginnings of black music in America around 1820.

Whether discussing Arne as a predecessor of Irving Berlin or Madonna as not a singer or a dancer or a songwriter, but a “performance artist” who knows how to get the media to manipulate themselves, the chapters maintain an even tone and a literate style.

It is in the passages where Clarke attempts unnecessary technical descriptions that weaknesses appear. He describes Charlie Parker’s first experiments with be-bop: “while playing ‘Cherokee’ at a gig, he began to improvise on the higher intervals of the chords, instead of the lower. This required new harmonic resolutions, and was in effect a new tune.” This is not helpful to the non-musician reader and rather uncomfortable for those with first-hand knowledge of these things. The first chapter, where the author is dealing with historical background, has a variety of such awkward descriptions, especially relating to musical textures. If Clarke alludes to Voix-Bulgares or many similar outfits of dressed-up folk music - once a very common practice in the eastem bloc - when he writes, “The earliest polyphonic music, from around 900 AD, was probably inspired by the music of Byzantium and the Middle East. Polyphonic folk-singing survives today in eastern Europa . . .” then he is wrong.

The normally monophonic, at the most, heterophonic singing traditions of eastern Europe have as much in common with these chart-topping recordings as the earlier, real jazz recordings made by artists like Donald Byrd, Nat King Cole or George Benson have with their later, commercial recordings made for the white pop audiences.

Clarke is at his best when he lets his biases and even prejudices come through, as this is never done heavy handedly, and gives the book some of its charm. He can dismiss a great jazz musician like Keith Jarret, very well respected by most jazz audiences and players, in one short and sharp sentence ”. . . spins out his notes across entire albums, moaning along with it, and sells many records.” He has a great interest in country-rock,where, apparently, some of the best vernacular poetry is being turned into “real songs”, and at the other extreme, there is much discussion of many free jazz and free-improvisation musicians, from Ornette Coleman to Derek Bailey and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

Although these are masters of their highly charged idioms, it is difficult to see what connection they have with popular music (or commercial music - as the author insistently overlaps these terms). There is no mention of the late Frank Zappa, one of the most important musicians and personalities of post-war music, whose views on the state of popular entertainment today had much in common with Clarke’s. Those neglected craftsmen of the commercial music world, the arrangers, and also the producers, get very welcome credit; but the Ertegun brothers, the founders of Atlantic Records, who in their capacity as arrangers, promoters, producers and fair-handed employers translated a private passion for all types of black music into an international campaign, are not mentioned. It is delightful to discover that the turn-of-the-century late-Romantic composer Hugo Alfven had an American chart hit in 1953, towards the end of his long life with his “Swedish Rhapsody”.

Sinan Carter Savaskan teaches music at Westminster School.