The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race, and Culture in Urban America

In this well-researched, important sociocultural study of the development of jazz between 1900 and 1940, Peretti argues that jazz--an urban music--was essentially ``created'' between 1915 and 1930 when Southern blacks migrated north to places like Kansas City and Chicago. According to the author, who teaches American studies at the University of Kansas, jazz rose as a cultural triumph, acquiring ``its expressive potential and social meaning'' despite big-city class and racial divisions. Peretti, relying heavily on oral history and newspaper accounts, examines such topics as differences between blues and jazz, the influence of European classical music and white musicians on early jazz, the effects on musicians of economic shifts and profiteers, race relations and male dominance among these cultural pioneers. Photos not seen by PW. (Oct.)