Where the Dark and the Light Folks Meet

Starred review from February 1, 2010
The common belief that racial conflict characterizes jazz history is false, jazz trumpeter Sandke says. Instead, jazz is demonstrably a product of black-white cooperation, beginning in its prehistory in nineteenth-century blackface minstrel shows, which Sandke represents as a major venue for antislavery sentiment before the Civil War and which turned viciously racist only with the rise of Jim Crow in the 1890s. In the 1920s and 30s, when jazz became synonymous with popular music, the top black and white bands were comparably well compensated. If jazz composers were often cheated out of royalties and copyrights, the culprits were black as well as white; sometimes they were musicians preying on other musicians. Bad history is to blame for the belief that jazz is sharply racially divided. Sandke scores such 1930s leftist-activist promoters as Vanderbilt scion John Hammond and field musicologist Alan Lomax for starting the racial-strife myths, activist and poet Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka for exacerbating them, andruefully, for they are fellow playersjazz spokesmen such as Wynton Marsalis (whom Sandke recognizes as mellowing with age and wisdom) for perpetuating them. This amateur historians book, more lucid and straightforward than most professional jazz critic-chroniclers could dream of producing, deserves every history-minded jazz fans attention.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)