The blues evolved from African-American gospel music, field songs, chants, and hollers. This music was often sung in mixed or minor keys, sometimes modal, which led...

At least since the 1938 publication of Dorothy Baker’s novel Young Man with a Horn , which was based on the short, miserable life of Bix...

Though often dominated by heartless economic conditions, jazz lives are nonetheless strikingly, if not infinitely, varied. By chance I was finishing reading John Szwed’s wholly admirable...