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The Color of Jazz: Race and Representation in Postwar American Culture. By Jon Panish. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi. 1997. xxiii, 166 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $18.00.
Jon Panish's The Color of Jazz: Race and Representation in Postwar American Culture examines competing racial discourses in the reception of jazz from 1945 to 1965. Through a set of taut, well-crafted chapters on the myth of interracial democracy in bohemian Greenwich Village, competing cultural constructions of Charlie Parker, and literary representations of jazz performance and narrative, Panish soberly unmasks the idealized image of jazz as a symbol of progressive racial politics, a utopian cultural space that stands as a beacon of a truer American democracy.
Blacks and whites have responded to jazz in fundamentally different ways, Panish argues. Where...