New Orleans Jazz, Dixieland, Chicago-Jazz, Swing, Bebop, Cool Jazz, Hard Bop, and Free Jazz. Up until today, the history of jazz is told as a “tradition” consisting of fixed components including a succession of jazz styles. How did this construction of music history emerge? What were the alternative perspectives? And why did a narrative of a fixed tradition catch on? In this study, Mario Dunkel examines narratives of jazz history from the beginnings of jazz up until the late 1950s. According to Dunkel, the jazz tradition is at the same time an attempt to approach historical reality and the product of a competition between cultural narratives. From middlebrow culture of the 1920s, the New Deal, the African American civil rights movement to the US’s role in the Cold War, Dunkel shows in detail how the jazz tradition, as a global narrative of the 20th century, is intertwined with greater social and cultural developments.weiterlesen