Jazz : a people's music / by Sidney Finkelstein

Includes index.

This item contains black and white illustrations of musicians playing jazz, of significant concerts in the history of jazz, and of significant figures in the jazz community in the 1940s, including Louis Armstrong, Leadbelly, and others.

The place of jazz in music history : the false division of "classical" and "popular" -- The African myth -- People's music and written music --

The sound of jazz : the instrument makes the music -- What jazz teaches us about the classics -- The jazz band --

The blues and the folk song of jazz : blues, breaks and riffs -- What is folk art -- New Orleans song -- Beloved tunes and new variations --

Improvisation and jazz form : another false division; improvisations versus composition -- The blues as a language -- Social forms of New Orleans music -- The breakout of the ghetto --

The pop tune, the hot solo & the large band : art and entertainment -- The solo style and the Tin-Pan-Alley tune -- Negro and white musicians together --

The experimental laboratory and the new jazz : large bands and the new sounds -- Jump music -- The experimental laboratory -- Bebop; progress and dilemma --

The future of jazz : the failure of jazz composition -- Stavinsky and others -- Modern music and folk language -- Jazz and Jim Crow -- New forms for jazz -- A people's theatre --

Jazz: A People's Music, first published in 1948, is a book that reflects the exciting musical- and social- events of its time. In many ways its message is just as daring today [1988] as it was forty years ago [1948]. That message- that the music we call jazz is a component part of the world body of creative music, a great music every bit as important in terms of its complexity, creativity, dynamic range and emotional depth as the great, celebrated music of the past, was a bold enough one in 1928. The alleged social inferiority of jazz- inferior because it was created by an allegedly "racially inferior" people- was a commonplace in those days. Indeed the very concept that jazz music was as much concert music as dance music, as much composition as it was song and improvisation, was considered by many to be the height of pretentiousness [...] Finkelstein wrote an interpretation of jazz that countered by many of the more popular notions then circulating in the music and general press. The new jazz of the postwar era- The music called bebop- was, in a sense, fighting for it's place in the sun. Aside from the difficult struggle to make a living faced by Parker, Gillespie, Monk, and the others, there was also the struggle for the legitimacy of the music, not so much among listeners of musicians as among journalists, publicists and, possibly most important, record companies. Although the new jazz had a nationwide, appreciative audience, it suffered a virtual boycott from the major big-business recording companies. The situation was so bad that it is possible that much of the music created by the pioneer generation of modern jazz musicians would not have been documented at all if it had not been for the enthusiasm of a few enterprising fans who opened what began as basement recording operations of "publish" this music on phonograph records. When Finkelstein wrote about the modern jazz of the 1940s being a kind of beacon of anti-commercialism directed against the increasing trivialization and commodification of popular culture, he wasn't kidding." --From the foreword