O'Meally's volume is the first to focus exclusively on the rich interdisciplinary commentary that jazz has inspired over the decades... Impressive and thoughtfully assembled.
Mark Tucker Jazz Times An important resource for understanding how such hard-to-define aspects as 'hipness' and 'soulfulness' shape a culture and its most characteristic forms of artistic expression.
Jerome Klinkowitz American Literary Scholarship An ... Read moreinnovative approach to understanding jazz within a larger social context. Library Journal Both a celebration and an analysis of jazz, this massive omnibus of essays, interviews, riffs, reminiscences, lectures and meditations examines the impact of jazz on American culture from the 1920s Harlem Renaissance to the 1960s black arts revolution... Outstanding. Publishers Weekly There is much that is ducal among the 35 wide-ranging essays collected in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. Billboard O'Meally has assembled an impressive anthology that achieves an almost synesthetic rendering of jazz...the best designed reference book on the topic to date. It should be in every library. Choice The Jazz Cadence of American Culture is a celebration of jazz that goes beyond the usual jazz history, carefully and informatively examining the impact of jazz on other arts, politics, and daily life. The Bookwatch A monument to a grand and vital intellectual tradition that we cannot afford to neglect as jazz enters its second century
and as that great interdisciplinary, interpretive synthesis of jazz scholarship finally gets written. Notes If race keeps us apart, jazz brings us together, as Ralph Ellison pointed out when he called American life 'jazz shaped.' The 35 essays in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, edited by Robert G. O'Meally, testify that Ellison was on to something. The Washington Post Book World Show Less