Ingrid Monson is one of the pre-eminent scholars of modern `usic, American history, and African American culture. In this book she puts forward a theoretically sophisticated, historically nuanced, and politically courageous analysis of how jazz was recast and remade on the treacherous terrain of postwar America (1950-1967). This book is cultural criticism at its best!
Cornel West, University Professor, ... Read morePrinceton University
In this brilliant, polyphonic rendering of the relationship of jazz to the civil rights movement, Monson offers a compelling account of the interplay of music, race, and aesthetic modernism in American history. The music itself is never tangential to her story; on the contrary, we see how it came to embody the very ethos of the struggle and the presumptions that nurtured it. Monson insists that jazz exemplifies the faith that inspired performance can break beyond existing artistic and social constraints, that it offers a vision of history relevant way beyond its time and place. The same might be said of this extraordinary book.
Jean Comaroff, Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago
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