Blues Up and Down: Jazz, Race, and American Culture in Our Time

Ever since the birth of jazz, critics have been sounding its death knell. Yet each time the music has survived, saved by its own core values of inclusion and community, and by the brilliance of its players. Tom Piazza, award-winning music journalist offers a chronicle of the recent upheavals in the jazz world, and a passionate argument for the music's continuing role in our culture. Blues Up and Down combines Piazza's influential reportage from The New York Times, The New Republic, and elsewhere, with a series of bold and broad new essays; together they form a sharp indictment of the schools of criticism that nearly strangled jazz -- and an insightful exploration of the traditions that propel the music onward.