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Article: Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity.(Book review)
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- March 1, 2007
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CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 Music Library Association, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity. By Paul Austerlitz. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. [xxii, 260 p. ISBN 08195-6781-7. $24.95.] Videography, discography, bibliography, index.
We ask a lot from jazz. To some commentators, jazz is definitive of twentieth-century Americanness, with Ralph Ellison characterizing American life as "jazz-based." To others, jazz is the epitome of the musical avant-garde, indeed central to "the great modernist tradition in the arts" (Alfred Appel, Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002], 7). During the Cold War, jazz was the United States' "secret ...