The Jazz Studies Renaissance

The publication of the essays in Jazz in Mind marks a tentative revival in jazz studies, the interdisciplinary examination of jazz as both a musical and cultural phenomenon.As the term "revival" suggests, today's scholars are not the first generation of academics to take a keen interest in what jazz musicians do, how their audiences respond to them, and how jazz becomes situated within various segments of American culture.To adequately locate and appreciate the essays in this volume, to grasp the diversity of approaches in jazz studies-and to articulate the field's current weaknesses-requires grounding the inquiry in the interests and achievements of that first generation of jazz scholars, active from the 1940s to the 1960s.After World War II, social scientists in the United States were casting about for case studies in deviance, which (along with its antithesis, conformity) was perhaps the central concern of sociology and social psychology in the McCarthy era.The notable few drawn to jazz musicians as prospective deviants perceived them as having a particularly marked out-group attitude and a special subculture.Carlo Lastrucci had pioneered the study of jazz bands in 1941,and in 1947Morroe Berger showed that mainstream disapproval of jazz (the precondition for jazz's deviant status) became palpable in the 1920s.In 1962 Neil Leonard published the pioneering book on jazz as social rebellion in the 1920s, Jazz and the White