Revisiting the Book that Captured the Radical Power of Jazz

During the first half of the 20th century, America found itself in the grip of jazz, one of the most expressive, original and transcendent of all musical genres. It broke down racial boundaries, crossed class divides and gave birth to a new type of nightlife culture, and yet it is notoriously difficult to describe in words (as Louis Armstrong put it, “If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.”) With this in mind, in 1960, German musicologist Joachim Berendt decided that the only…