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This chapter explores the impact of white appropriation and commercial interests on the evolution of jazz. They long contributed to the economic exploitation of black musicians and in imposing white values and preferences over jazz. Free jazz musicians show awareness of their economic position in the music business and their music can be read as a political decision to break from it.

The history of jazz dance is intimately tied to the history of jazz music. Collectively, as jazz expression with common histories and shared aesthetic characteristics, their entwined history from emancipation to the 1970s is complex. Their parallel histories reveal a multiplicity of aesthetic approaches and interactions, and a fluidity of cultural, musical, and dance identities. Thus, jazz history is a landscape of evolving meanings, values, ideas, sounds, movements, contestations, contradictions, pluralities, and multiple constructions of “what is jazz.” In this chapter, the historical discussion of jazz and its West African roots is framed through an examination of relevant jazz dance and music history literature, as well as oral history interviews. This discussion and analysis offers a broad historical overview intended to introduce the sweep of jazz dance and music history.

There have been a number of outstanding studies that articulate the importance of black music for “Afro-modernist” literary production since Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Through inquiry into influential Marxist, Black Atlantic, and African diasporic studies of jazz literature and jazz history, the introduction explains how Jazz Internationalism is distinguished by its historical scope and attention to multiple genres of jazz literature. This introduction outlines not only a history of Afro-modernist jazz literature that corresponds with the Long Civil Rights Movement, it also underscores the intertextuality of jazz literature as it evolves through several generations of black music and writing. While the primary purpose of Jazz Internationalism is not one of recovering obscure writers or texts, it does make the case for a more expansive understanding of jazz writing for both African American literary history and African diasporic studies more generally.

This final chapter concerns the unusual career of Sidney Bechet, the New Orleans reedman who occupies a special position among émigré African-American musicians in France. Appearing first in 1919, he – and jazz – were famously eulogized by conductor Ernest Ansermet; in 1925 he helped to launch Josephine Baker to international stardom. Iconic moments in retrospect, but Ansermet’s text is not as trusty a symbol of Europeans’ acute perception as historians have long assumed; and Bechet’s true rise to fame came not until a Gallic version of the New Orleans revival movement in the forties and fifties – “Bechetmania” as it has been called. No straightforward revivalist, Bechet’s versions of old Creole folksongs – or their ur-type – divided critics; but they struck a chord with French audiences, generating nostalgia for a common past that may never have been. Bechet, too, was busy reshaping history: appropriating an old folktale to write himself into the very foundations of jazz. In the end, it is the gap between their understandings that proves most illuminating: Bechet was not reliving the past for its own sake but rather remaking it for the current day – even, in his crazed reception by French teenagers, anticipating the popular music of the future.

This chapter discusses jazz education and the shift from urban nightclubs to schools as the primary homes of hundreds of jazz composers and musicians. However, this shift continues to be marginalized, ignored, or belittled throughout the wide range of jazz discourse. The chapter also examines several deeply held conceptions of jazz history and music education in order to encourage people to reconsider the roles that schools currently play in the development and spread of jazz music.

This chapter focuses on Jelly Roll Morton, a jazz pianist, bandleader, and composer, showing how tensions in jazz are expressed in Morton's music, and examining a basic epistemological question about the roots of jazz. It explains how a transnational perspective may enhance people's understanding of jazz history. The chapter also considers what Morton's background, his experiences as a popular musician, his creolized musical blend, and his relationship to Latin music and culture may tell about national identity.

Monk is an icon of jazz history and American culture in general. This chapter explores his legacy, looking at how and why musicians from successive generations have reacted and responded to that legacy, and provides an account of its reception history. A critical reception of the work of jazz critics, historians, and so forth is important in constructing Monk's legacy, and is discussed. In addition, the chapter focuses on performers and performance. It also stands as a case study for larger questions about influence in jazz and the concept's significance for jazz historiography. Finally, the chapter explores the question of how Monk, who was once an enigmatic and controversial figure on the fringes of the jazz world, is now lauded as one of the greatest members of the music's canon and has become part of jazz history.

This chapter explores the colorful history of jazz. It pieces together the origins of great jazz recordings, hit songs, and important performances. Next, it takes a look at some of the popular jazz groups and singers, such as the 369th Infantry Jazz band, Spud Murphy, and Jack Teagarden. It also studies the first recorded hit of the jazz age and the world premiere of “Rhapsody in Blue.” The chapter also studies the development of recording technology by studying Dick Hyman's recording session, which included the direct-to-CD production of Dick Hyman Plays Duke Ellington.

The A&R man became a record producer with the development of magnetic tape (a spoil of World War II) and the introduction of the vinyl long-playing record by Columbia Records in 1948. Producers could capture on tape—for reproduction and sale on records—jazz that had routinely happened for many years only on various stages. When recording technology caught up with the actual practice of improvising musicians, jazz discovered an ideal form in the "album." George Avakian's visionary work with Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Erroll Garner, Buck Clayton, and Dave Brubeck realized what could be done with the new format and technology. The productions of Milt Gabler, Bob Weinstock, Esmond Edwards, Don Schlitten Teo Macero, Bob Thiele, Orrin Keepnews, Nesuhi Ertegun, Creed Taylor, Lester Koenig, Nat Hentoff ushered in a golden age for jazz.

This introductory chapter digs up the forgotten legacies of arrangers in jazz music and emphasizes their importance in the cultural history of music. It illustrates how African American arranger Francis “Chappie” Willet's (1907–76) career offers a poignant model for examining some of the controversies surrounding the arranging discipline. Willet was an ambitious entrepreneur—he established a music school, recording studio, talent agency, and publishing venture—and a celebrated “race man” in the black press, enjoying an unusually well-documented career that reflected many social concerns of the period. The chapter also delves into the history of jazz music and the Swing Era as a whole, as well as the place of the arranger in jazz history, and briefly discusses the historical sources from which this volume's research is based on.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of New York's so-called “loft jazz era,” one of the least-understood periods in jazz history. Spanning from the mid-1960s until about 1980, the jazz lofts were a dense network of musician-run performance venues established in and around the former industrial buildings of lower Manhattan. The majority of these spaces were also musicians' homes, a factor that allowed them to operate with minimal overhead costs. In various contexts, lofts acted as rehearsal halls, classrooms, art galleries, living quarters, and meeting spaces. Their most visible role, however, was as public performance venues, especially for younger members of the jazz avant garde. At a time when few commercial nightclubs were interested in experimental styles, the lofts became a bustling base of operations for a growing community of young improvisers.

Recording jazz onto multitrack tape meant that, while music continued to be captured onto tape in studios, albums could be constructed in postproduction: analogous to the way movies were shot on soundstages and assembled in editing rooms. Some musicians—especially Miles Davis and his jazz fusion bands—directed improvisations in the recording studio and left the task of assembling albums to their producers. Audiences for such albums heard, not studio games of cut 'n' paste, but tracks that resembled the turn-on-a-dime musical performances they heard in concert—performances which imitated techniques devised in postproduction. Enabling the naiveté of this audience is an overarching truth: jazz production almost always uses available technologies to ensure that in-the-moment performances are recorded (and, later, reproduced) as perfectly as possible.

This chapter discusses the common interpretations of Coltrane’s suite and how the album is described in musical terms. It highlights how the album feeds into the established binaries of jazz history, from the balance between the composed and the improvised, to the live and the mediated. It also states that it is important to develop an understanding of why binaries exist, and to explain the need for ideological control and the dominant discourses, which range from the idealized construction of the jazz canon to the deification of Coltrane and his music. It concludes by suggesting that A Love Supreme provides a means of challenging straightforward reading of music and established models of understanding.

This chapter examines the symbolic importance of A Love Supreme within the canon of seminal jazz recordings. It discusses the reification of jazz and the ritualistic value instilled in A Love Supreme through a detailed analysis of Coltrane literature, musician’s reactions, and the marketing strategies of the Impulse label, and comments on the album’s status as an iconic cultural artifact. It illustrates how recordings feed into consumer desires for collection, nostalgia, and the deification of artists, and supports the ideals of a linear and teleological history. It concludes with an assessment of Coltrane as a deified artist whose masterpiece is situated at the heart of hagiographic depictions of jazz history.

This chapter focuses on the life of Paul Whiteman, beginning with Wilberforce Whiteman's disgust for his son's “laziness” and the eventual departure of Paul from his home in Denver, and his move to San Francisco, and his eventual arrival at Atlantic City. Louis Armstrong's story, on the other hand, begins in New Orleans, where segregation based on race and class was a part of life. Whiteman anticipated finding work in San Francisco as a symphony musician, a journey and goal that he hoped would gain his father's respect. He was fortunate enough to acquire a position in the viola section of the eighty-piece San Francisco Exposition Orchestra. Armstrong, on the other hand, would somehow find a way to lift himself out of his family's history of slavery and privation. Thus, the chapter marks all the significant steps and events in Paul Whiteman's and Louis Armstrong's lives that would place them in the timeline of jazz music.

According to jazz pianist Andrew Hill, in the 1950s, you couldn't go anywhere without hearing music. It wasn't a time of ghetto blasters, but a time when people played instruments and appreciated variety. People were so into music. By this time, bebop, which started out as an unrestrained form of emotional expression, had become codified and was in decline. Slowly, a more flexible and expressive style surfaced from trumpeteers. Throughout the years, they gained a following, because of the music's simplicity, openness, and blues-and-gospel influences. By the mid-fifties, hard bop had emerged. It was nourished by bands of musicians who backed each other up. While it was accused of being a simplified version of bebop, it helped jazz regain some acceptance in the black neighborhoods.