Body And Soul: The Making Of American Modernism

In this book Robert Crunden puts the “jazz” back in the Jazz Age. Jazz was America’s greatest contribution to the Modernist movement, yet it is much overlooked. When we hear the term “Jazz Age,” we conjure the ghosts of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Eliot, not Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, George Gershwin, and Duke Ellington. In order to correct this imbalance, Crunden re-introduces us to these musical luminaries who gave the era its name as he traces the early history of jaz…