Jazz in American Culture
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
This history of jazz, spanning the twentieth century, is the first to place it within the broad context of American culture. Burton Peretti argues persuasively that this distinctive American music has been a key thread in the tapestry of the nation’s culture. The music itself, its players and its audience, and the critical debates it has prompted, tell us much about changes in American life since 1910. Mr. Peretti traces the emergence of jazz out of ragtime during a time of tumultuous growth of cites and industries. In the 1920s jazz flourished and symbolized the cultural struggle between modernists and traditionalists. As American 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 symbolizes important cultural trends and enjoys a new prestige in a complex musical scene. Jazz in American Culture tells a peculiarly American story, evaluating the music as well as those who created it, and opening new perspectives on our cultural history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
If the quick pace of Peretti's historical discourse leaves genre didacts and obscurantists grousing about the lack of finer definition in many details, novice fans will find that Jazz in American Culture offers a proper accounting for the music's cultural import. From the earliest ragtime to the post-bop present, jazz has always epitomized that most American of ideals: progress. Peretti (Creation of Jazz: Music, Race, and Culture in Urban America) defines jazz's progressive cultural impact along racial and sociological lines. The earliest jazz performances, the "jungle reviews," portrayed African American musicians as primitives, forbidden to mingle with customers. So an important part of jazz's social context is reflected in the opposition of such greats as Charles Mingus and Dizzy Gillespie to separatist ideas and the early, persistent demands of many jazz musicians for equal rights. Peretti goes beyond the cliche of a roaring "jazz age" followed by years of declining popularity, but shows that while the technical complexity demonstrated by Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk revived a stagnating genre, many fans preferred to dance in the direction of easier, more accessible sounds. Once and for all, jazz parted ways with popular taste. Peretti argues that the various genre experiments that followed bebop reflected an ever-quickening sense of racial progress for African Americans and for the country as a whole. It's an intriguing premise that makes it all the more unfortunate that today's best players don't enjoy a wider audience.
