Charleston Jazz, South Carolina (Images of America Series) Book

Very well researched, Anderson lays bear the device which gave rise to the revolutionary genre of jazz - specifically 'free jazz'.

Anderson first sets out the context in 1950s America, as jazz (specifically the bebop of dizzy gillespie and others) was exported as a unit of soft power in the cold war, to counter soviet claims that the States suffered from "cultural backwardness". In doing so they created an idealised conception of jazz that superficially epitomises everything American - progress, community, and individualism. The American establishment however, in their hubris, overlooked the fundamental contradictions rife in American society that gave rise to jazz in the first place. Freedom is an illusion in capitalist society, a system built on oppression.

The book then proceeds to explore attempts made to uncover the racial oppression ubiquitous throughout American society - hence, free jazz. The freedom principle was based on relentless, penetrating innovation that sought to elevate the genre to classical-like levels of profundity, particularly through the works of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane (or the first wave). Doing so sparked rigid debates about 'the black aesthetic', and how to counter onslaughts of commodification, appropriation of the genre, and crises of direction. Anderson spends much time assessing Amiri Baraka's contribution to this aesthetic debate and his understanding of culture as fundamental to political struggle (after visiting Cuba!). Tensions within the revolutionary impetus existent within free jazz are revealed through the rigid separatism of some exponents who want to exclude white people from the genre - of which Baraka disagreed with. Though I wouldn't take a side; the fact that free jazz came about explicitly as a result of black experience, something exceptional to African American culture, that ultimately resulted in an art form irreplicable from the white perspective - tends to make me sympathise towards Mingus when he states that white people "have no right to play it". The constant battle raged on between the jazz greats and the market, fighting for an aesthetic autonomy that would not only represent what it means to be an African American, but also further their revolutionary struggle.

Ultimately however, the market wins out. Faced with the overwhelming hegemony of the culture industry that subjects all art forms to a state of servitude that accompanies commodification, free jazz is not able to maintain its struggle. Through gradual assimilation into the establishment, a sense of classicism is restored in jazz through the likes of Wynton Marsalis who seek to rigidly define the genre in terms of set conventions and procedures - something Ornette Coleman would be turning in his grave about.