What rings clear throughout Szwed's otherwise perplexing archive of a complex life, is the “consistency and taste" Billie Holiday "brought to nearly every performance” under all kinds of material, physical, and emotional circumstances.
"Jazz is dead!" "Long live jazz!" These competing diagnoses define the genre and its evolving boundaries. And that means a future of interesting music.
In a finely drawn outline of a life that was filled with activity, with meetings, with far-reaching observations and brilliant imaginings, Andrea Wulf has made a wonderful contribution to the record of Humboldt’s life and work.
Why our culture of law enforcement—and tensions between police and communities—is a lot more nuanced and interesting than you might think.
Both the LeDoux and Inoki fights are mere footnotes on Muhammad Ali’s athletic resume. Yet Paul Levy’s biography of LeDoux, The Fighting Frenchman, and Josh Gross’s exhaustive account of Ali vs. Inoki, give readers another way of looking at fights that elevated their importance, if not for Ali, then for the men who opposed him in these bouts.
Despite the recent trend in American scholarship emphasizing the transnational and cross-cultural dimensions of American culture, Victor Séjour is rarely mentioned. Elèna Mortara’s Writing For Justice: Victor Séjour, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara in the Age of Transatlantic Emancipations addresses this gap.
McDowell’s and Aalto’s respective books, published by the same press within two years of each other, are impressive studies of the relationship between literature and landscapes, both emotional and physical, in Potter’s Peter Rabbit and Milne’s Pooh Bear.
How state lawmakers seeking a solution to St. Louis County’s municipal revenue problems found more than they bargained for.
The recent film Miles Ahead says a lot about how Miles Davis treated women and, by extension, the ways jazz fans view his legacy.
Some grace notes to our original May 3 listicle of great films about jazz.