| Contents |
From ragtime to jazz in the 1910s. A modernizing society, ragtime, Black musicians and the city, James Reese Europe and nightlife, New Orleans, World War I -- Hot and sweet, white and black: the jazz age. The first jazz vogue of the 1920s, post-Victorian mass leisure, debate between modernists and traditionalists, African-American communities and jazz, musicians and the color line -- The Great Depression, the "common man," and the swing era. Growth of the music and the business, economic impact of the depression, political reform and the culture of the thirties, the swing boom in New Deal context -- Jazz goes to war. Economic upheavals after 1939 in society and popular music; music on the home front and overseas, evolution of musical tastes, Dixieland and bebop, critics, musicians, and the postwar temper -- Cool jazz, hard bop, affluence, and anxiety. Avant-garde music for the atomic age, jazz and the cold war, musicians and deviance, California cool, accelerating change in the late fifties -- "We insist": jazz inside and outside the 1960s. Jazz and the civil rights movement, the avant-garde and Black power, the rock revolution and the apparent decline of jazz -- Fusion and fragmentation: jazz at the end of the American century. Fusion and funk in the early seventies; jazz, country, and the politics of culture; conservativism and "classic" jazz in the eighties; Race, class, and jazz into the 1990s. |
| Abstract |
In his unusual new book, Mr. Peretti charts the birth and development of jazz since 1900 alongside the historical context that both contributed to and reflected this distinctive music. Three aspects of this connection interest Mr. Peretti: the music itself, the musicians who have played it, and the audience. Within these motifs, he traces the emergence of jazz out of ragtime just after the turn of the century, during a tumultuous period of urban and industrial growth. By the time the 1920s arrived, jazz was flourishing and had begun to symbolize the cultural struggle between modernists and traditionalists. As Americans sought reassurance and self-esteem during the Great Depression, jazz reached new levels of sophistication in the Swing Era. World War II encouraged rapid changes in popular tastes, and in the postwar decades jazz became both a voice of a globally dominant America and an avant-garde music reflecting social and political turmoil. Today, Mr. Peretti concludes, jazz may seem like a relatively minor part of our culture, dominated as it is by computers, video, "pop" music, and political movements. But, he insists, jazz continues to speak to all of us in countless direct and indirect ways. |
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