| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists. By Eric Porter. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xxii, 404 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-520-21872-8. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 0-520-23296-8.)

Operating on a premise borrowed from Joel A. Rogers concerning the paradoxical nature of jazz, Eric Porter has written a compelling intellectual history of the music's impact on African American, American, and international cultural, institutional, economic, and creative life. He argues convincingly for the inclusion of musicians as intellectuals, not simply as performers. Porter opines that musicians' articulations, particularly those of black performers, are generally overlooked. Important for Porter are the broad contested contexts that shaped the innovations and reception of jazz and in turn were shaped by the music. The very word jazz and its associated meanings had been subject to an ongoing and sometimes acrimonious debate even before the music broke fully onto the American public's consciousness in the 1920s. . . .

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