This introduction establishes the wide variety of cultural and historical contexts that Jazz and American Culture covers by revisiting five moments across the past century. Beginning with the first recording by a Black woman in 1920 and moving to the pandemic summer of 2020, these five vignettes present us not with a straight line through American history but instead offer a series of nodes that suggest the complicated ways jazz has been entangled with American politics, aesthetic upheavals, technological and economic changes, and the lived experience of the everyday. Most importantly, these select moments across the history of jazz and American culture– spanning Jim Crow to George Floyd– remind us how the music’s development out of African American expressive culture is key to understanding both its ongoing response to the violence of American racism and its incisive critique of American democracy’s failures.

Margaret Bonds’s upbringing and education inculcated in her a profound sense of pride in her racial and familial heritage and an equally profound sense of obligation to “go farther” than those who came before her in using her art for the betterment of the lives of others. Moving from her youth through her years as a struggling musician in New York and Los Angeles during the Depression and World War II, through her ascendance to national and international fame, this chapter traces the development of these themes in her personal philosophy and compositional work over the period ca. 1939–63 in works including the incidental music to Shakespeare in Harlem, The Ballad of the Brown King, and Simon Bore the Cross, leading to their coalescence in The Montgomery Variations (1963–64). The Variations thus emerges as the summit of Bonds’s works centered on the theme of racial justice up to that point.

The modern usage of cool was developed by jazz musicians as part of their in-group slang in post-World War II New York City. This linguistic fact remains unrecognized within scholarship on jazz, etymology, and popular culture. For jazz musicians, cool signified a calm state of mind, a relaxed style of performance, embodied composure, and a melodic low-key musical aesthetic. The roots for these meanings of cool are to be found in West African languages and drumming practices, rather than English language precedent. During the Cold War, European authors embraced jazz as a key element of rebellion against totalitarianism, with the jazz musician elevated as a literary figure of American existentialism. The cool musical aesthetic became a global style through Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, and Chet Baker, and then through the bossa nova. Once the term and concept was adapted and appropriated by white writers and jazz fans, “cool” became a generalized emblem and synonym for rebellion.

Bonds’s setting of the Du Bois Credo continues and extends the series of musical appeals for racial justice that had led to The Montgomery Variations, just as the revised version of Credo published at the head of his first autobiography, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, in 1920 extends the ideas that had led to the original 1904 version of Du Bois’s text. This chapter frames both the Du Bois Credo and Bonds’s musical setting thereof as articulations of the themes and issues of the works’ respective biographical contexts and, taken together, a dyadic lens into their creators’ perspectives on the societal upheavals of the most turbulent years of the twentieth century. Then, after demonstrating why, and how, the Credo was effectively silenced during Margaret Bonds’s lifetime despite its obvious importance, timeliness, and musical genius – including conversation with the publisher who insisted that the work could not be published unless its text were altered – the chapter closes by exploring the work’s first posthumous performances and documenting the ringing endorsement of Shirley Graham Du Bois, widow of the poet, for this “work of art that is eternal.”

While the history of jazz and the biographies of the music’s practitioners have long enjoyed the attention of critics and audiences, the jazz musicians’ life stories, told in writing and from their personal perspectives, remain an understudied area of jazz scholarship and autobiography studies. This chapter surveys the genre of jazz autobiography by identifying its major styles, forms, and narrative patterns and tracing its century-long history from the 1920s to the 2020s. Assessing works by famous musician-writers such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Anita O’Day, and Artie Shaw, the chapter outlines the diversity of jazz autobiography, focusing on questions of narrative perspective, written and oral style, musical influences, as well as raced, classed, and gendered experiences. The chapter suggests that this diversity is nonetheless encapsulated by a common genre poetics of the jazz life as told from the musician’s vantage point.

Details the investigation of the Ukraine scandal by the House of Representatives, the decision to impeach Trump, and the debates over the nature and scope of the articles of impeachment.

The concluding chapter quickly surveys the arc of impeachment history through the two acquittals of Donald Trump and considers whether impeachment remains a useful tool against presidential overreach and what the two acquittals of Trump suggest about the health of the American political project.

Liner notes evolved during the twentieth century as a new genre of music writing, one that served as both a compliment and a complement to the pioneering jazz recordings it set out to describe. Prior to the purchase of a jazz album, liner notes gave consumers a preview of the sounds they would soon hear (and the messages they might receive). As decades passed, some liner notes became as memorable as the albums they graced. When writers as diverse as Ira Gitler, Amiri Baraka, and Stanley Crouch emerged as tastemakers in jazz circles, it was not only for their music criticism, but also for the liner notes they placed on albums by John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, and Wynton Marsalis. This essay considers a host of writers who made liner notes a key factor within jazz culture, and within American discourse more generally.

Birth of a Genre: “Conspiracy theory” rises steeply during the Cold War in the United States, including conspiratorial thinking about the Bible. A new genre, “Gospel Thrillers,” emerges at the same time and a close reading of the first Gospel Thriller, The Q Document (1964), shows how this conspiratorial atmosphere reshapes the personal, theological, and political stakes examined in Chapter 1 of this book.

Throughout jazz history, improvisation has been central to the music’s aesthetic and social force. From the polyphonic group extemporizations of early styles, through the featured solos within Swing Era arrangements, to bebop’s harmonic steeplechase or the open form experiments that followed, jazz musicians have privileged departures from through-composed scores and fixed musical texts. This essay considers the social, ideological, and aesthetic stakes of these departures, exploring how the music’s emphasis on improvisation constitutes both an ongoing impetus for artistic innovation and a vital challenge to the American status quo. By opening up a cultural space for validating otherwise marginalized Black innovators, improvisation has offered resources for hope, social transformation, and Black mobility. It has also enabled an ongoing critique of existing discourses, subjecting the rigidity of white supremacy, Eurocentrism, or sexism, for instance, to reformulation through an articulation of other possible futures.

Jazz photographs are evidentiary documents, nostalgic memorials, and contributors to a romantic mythology and mystique. Sight and sound are combined and made more potent by mutual association. But classic jazz photographs do not exist in the realm of myth alone. Jazz photographs intersected with trends in portraiture, documentary, and advertising during the peak decades of the music’s popularity. They described the social contours of the music– the places where it was heard and the communities formed around it. And images helped sell the music, whether promoting performances or recordings. Photographs also made African American artistic innovation more obvious as the drive for equality gained momentum. The symbiotic relationship between the two art forms has been strengthened over more than one hundred years. Publicity portraiture, photojournalism, album cover imagery, street photography, African American photography, and archival and exhibition curation have all probed the music’s deep beauty for visual analogues and associations.

The Great Migration, which began in the late nineteenth century and witnessed the movement of more than six million Black folk from the agrarian US South to the urban North between 1919 and 1970, and the flourishing of “Black Renaissances” in Harlem, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and other Northern urban centers were the essential soil in which are rooted not only the two works that are the subject of this book, but also the lives and careers of Margaret Bonds, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes. This chapter explores the roles of those two large societal seizings of freedom for the poor and oppressed as the context for Margaret Bonds’s career and the source of her career-long commitment to using her art to uplift what she in 1942 called “our oppressed Race” and work for global equality.

After the heavy saturation of blues performing in the 1920s and the application of various elements– rhythm, syncopation, call and response, lyrics, and so on– to avant-garde literature, Black and white, of the time, the country descended into a prolonged Depression in the 1930s. Blues recording ground nearly to a halt for several years, though conditions that fed into the blues were in ample supply. The music was changing with the amalgamation of swing band elements and boogie-woogie with the rural blues, producing a jumping hybrid that used blues structures and lyrics with a big-band lilt. The move to the Left, especially in the artistic community, found literary blues having a decidedly Leftist feel in writers such as Langston Hughes, holding over from the twenties and Frank Marshall Davis emerging in the thirties. There were still the musical artists from various genres, including classical, who made use of the blues, and movies, for example, reflected the music as well. It was a new kind of hot music– and thus, hot music literature– that was in the offing.

Describes the facts of Donald Trump’s effort to extort Ukraine into announcing investigations of his presidential rival Joseph Biden and how exposure of that effort led to a renewed effort to impeach him.