These days jazz seems so marginalized that it’s bracing to read a book that shows so clearly how and why jazz is relevant to larger social, political, and cultural issues… [Saul’s] analysis of the 1960 riot at the Newport Jazz Festival and the different ways jazz critics, social commentators, and black intellectuals and artists—including poet Langston Hughes and bassist Charles Mingus—reacted to it, is some of the most insightful writing on the tensions between consumer culture and jazz culture, and the black–white racial divide that I’ve ever read. Saul also maps out the connections that artists and critics saw between the progressive politics of the civil rights and Black Power movements and avant-garde music… This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the wider cultural and political issues that have affected jazz in the past 50 years.
