"Subversive Sounds" probes New Orleans s history, uncovering a web of racial interconnections and animosities that was instrumental to the creation of a vital American art form jazz. Drawing on oral histories, police reports, newspaper accounts, and vintage recordings, Charles Hersch brings to vivid life the neighborhoods and nightspots where jazz was born.

This volume shows how musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Nick La Rocca, and Louis Armstrong negotiated New Orleans s complex racial rules to pursue their craft and how, in order to widen their audiences, they became fluent in a...

Jews and Jazz: Improvising Jewish Identity explores the meaning of Jewish involvement in the world of American jazz. It focuses on the ways prominent jazz musicians like Stan Getz, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Lee Konitz, Dave Liebman, Michael Brecker, and Red Rodney have engaged with jazz in order to explore and construct ethnic identities.

The author looks at Jewish identity construction through jazz in the context of the surrounding American culture, believing that American Jews have used jazz to construct three kinds of identities: to become more American, to emphasize...