By 1940, both America and the rest of the world recognized swing music as America’s “most distinctive contribution” to world musical culture...

An oft-repeated tale in the annals of modern jazz has it that bebop was born at Minton’s Playhouse in New York City in 1940, where the house...

In my last entry I wrote about Casablanca (1942) as an example of wartime propaganda, about how the film enacted the ideological need to va...

In my blog entry yesterday, I wrote about the effect of World War II on jazz music, and how it rendered the modernist values jazz had come t...

The effect of World War II on jazz music was to render the modernist values jazz had come to represent in the 1920s and 30s—individualism an...

The late Robin Wood’s Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan (Columbia UP, 1986) contains what I believe to be an extremely valuable discussion ...

Last night I watched Ron Mann’s documentary Grass (1999), not so much a social history of marijuana in the United States as an exploration ...

As Ted Gioia observes in The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture (1988), in the early years of jazz studies, the first im...

For some reason, after a couple of years of existence, my blog is now being targeted for random comments from a location (or locations) over...

About three weeks ago, I wrote a short blog entry on the famous cynic Diogenes, the great anti-Socratic. Diogenes was greatly admired by Al...

In Chapter 2 (“The Rise of Individualism and the Jazz Solo”) of James Lincoln Collier’s book, Jazz: The American Theme Song (1993), Collier...

Friedrich Kittler ( Gramophone, Film, Typewriter , 1999) argues that from around 1880 on, composers of music have been “allied with engineer...