Ken Burns and geoffrey Ward bring us the history of the first American music, from its beginnings in Ragtime, Blues and Gospel, through to the present day. JAZZ has been a prism through which so much of American History can be seen - a curious and unusually objective witness to the 20th Century.

The emergence of jazz out of New Orleans is part of the American story, but the creation of this music was more than a regional phenomenon: it also crossed geographical, cultural, and technological lines. Court Carney takes a new look at the spread and acceptance of jazz in America, going beyond the familiar accounts of music historians and documentarians to show how jazz paralleled and propelled the broader changes taking place in America's economy, society, politics, and culture. Cuttin' Up takes readers back to the 1920s and early 1930s to describe how jazz musicians navigated the rocky racial terrain of the music business-and how new media like the phonograph, radio, and film accelerated its diffusion and contributed to variations in its styles. The first history of jazz to emphasize the connections between these disseminating technologies and specific locales, it describes the distinctive styles that developed in four cities and tells how the opportunities of each influenced both musicians' choices and the marketing of their music. Carney begins his journey in New Orleans, where pioneers like Jelly Roll Morton and Buddy Bolden set the tone for the new music, then takes readers up the river to Chicago, where Joe Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, featuring a young Louis Armstrong, first put jazz on record. The genre received a major boost in New York through radio's live broadcasts from venues like the Cotton Club, then came to a national audience when Los Angeles put it in the movies, starting with the appearance of Duke Ellington's orchestra in Check and Double Check. As Carney shows, the journey of jazz had its racial component as well, ranging from New Orleans' melting pot to Chicago's segregated music culture, from Harlem clubs catering to white clienteles to Hollywood's reinforcement of stereotypes. And by pinpointing specific cultural turns in the process of bringing jazz to a national audience, he shows how jazz opens a window on the creation of a modernist spirit in America. A 1930 tune called "Cuttin' Up" captured the freewheeling spirit of this new music-an expression that also reflects the impact jazz and its diffusion had on the nation as it crossed geographic and social boundaries and integrated an array of styles into an exciting new hybrid. Deftly blending music history, urban history, and race studies, Cuttin' Up recaptures the essence of jazz in its earliest days.

As musicians, listeners, and scholars have sensed for many years, the story of jazz is more than a history of the music. Burton Peretti presents a fascinating account of how the racial and cultural dynamics of American cities created the music, life, and business that was jazz. From its origins in the jook joints of sharecroppers and the streets and dance halls of 1890s New Orleans, through its later metamorphoses in the cities of the North, Peretti charts the life of jazz culture to the eve of bebop and World War II. In the course of those fifty years, jazz was the story of players who made the transition from childhood spasm bands to Carnegie Hall and worldwide touring and fame. It became the music of the Twenties, a decade of Prohibition, of adolescent discontent, of Harlem pride, and of Americans hoping to preserve cultural traditions in an urban, commercial age. And jazz was where black and white musicians performed together, as uneasy partners, in the big bands of Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman. "Blacks fought back by using jazz", states Peretti, "with its unique cultural and intellectual properties, to prove, assess, and evade the "dynamic of minstrelsy". Drawing on newspaper reports of the times and on the firsthand testimony of more than seventy prominent musicians and singers (among them Benny Carter, Bud Freeman, Kid Ory, and Mary Lou Williams), The Creation of Jazz is the first comprehensive analysis of the role of early jazz in American social history.

A galvanizing history of how jazz and jazz musicians flourished despite rampant cultural exploitation The music we call “jazz” arose in late nineteenth century North America—most likely in New Orleans—based on the musical traditions of Africans, newly freed from slavery. Grounded in the music known as the “blues,” which expressed the pain, sufferings, and hopes of Black folk then pulverized by Jim Crow, this new music entered the world via the instruments that had been abandoned by departing military bands after the Civil War. Jazz and Justice examines the economic, social, and political forces that shaped this music into a phenomenal US—and Black American—contribution to global arts and culture. Horne assembles a galvanic story depicting what may have been the era’s most virulent economic—and racist—exploitation, as jazz musicians battled organized crime, the Ku Klux Klan, and other variously malignant forces dominating the nightclub scene where jazz became known. Horne pays particular attention to women artists, such as pianist Mary Lou Williams and trombonist Melba Liston, and limns the contributions of musicians with Native American roots. This is the story of a beautiful lotus, growing from the filth of the crassest form of human immiseration.

Examines the possible origins of jazz, its variety, greatness, and individual artists.