Jazz Jews

From early jazz to the dance bands of the swing era, from bebop to jazz-rock to the avant-garde, as the composers of jazz standards, and as impresarios, record producers and the founders of jazz labels, festivals and venues, Jews have been and are there, wherever jazz is performed. This book explores the role of Jews in breaking the colour bar in American jazz, in using jazz as an instrument against apartheid, and Soviet oppression, and as a means of survival in Nazi death camps. The book also investigates the phenomenon and influence of "Jewish jazz", from the Jazz Age to the present day. Mike Gerber has interviewed everyone that matters -Jews and not Jews, Black and White, and his book includes one of the las interviews with Artie Shaw.

CONTENIDO:

-Preface: A stormy introduction
-Acknowledgments

Part I: The USA
1. Whose music is it anyway?
2. Jazz age conundrum
3. "White Negroes" and a Black Jew
4. Swing high
5. The chant
6. Shaw
7. Fruit of a different tree
8. Raising standards?
9. Bop and beats
10. Blowing hot and "cool"
11. Race for the studios
12. "New Thing", old sores
13. Women's problems
14. Mainstreamers and "Mambonicks"
15. Between rock and a smooth place

Part II: Worldwide
16. "Art in the abyss". Germany to 1945
17. Soviet Europe. Swingers and subversives
18. Old world blues
19. Britain. The "Heebie Jeebies"
20. Trouble in mind. Israel
21. International Bopspiracy

Part III: Fusions and conclusions
22. Rooted cosmopolitans
23. So what?

-Bibliography
-Index