Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries

What is jazz? What is gained--and what is lost--when various communities close ranks around a particular definition of this quintessentially American music? Jazz/Not Jazz explores some of the musicians, concepts, places, and practices which, while deeply connected to established jazz institutions and aesthetics, have rarely appeared in traditional histories of the form. David Ake, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Goldmark have assembled a stellar group of writers to look beyond the canon of acknowledged jazz greats and address some of the big questions facing jazz today. More than just a history of jazz and its performers, this collections seeks out those people and pieces missing from the established narratives to explore what they can tell us about the way jazz has been defined and its history has been told.

David Ake is Professor and Chair of the Department of Musicology at the Frost School of Music, University of Miami. Charles Hiroshi Garrett is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Michigan and the author of Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music in the Twentieth Century, (UC Press). Daniel Goldmark is Associate Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author and co-author of three books for UC Press: Tunes for ’Toons, Beyond the Soundtrack, and Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Hollywood