Jazz Diplomacy: Promoting America in the Cold War Era. By Lisa E. Davenport. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.

Abstract

A final point regards Savran's discussion of Carpenter's Krazy Kat: A Jazz Pantomime (1921). The author correctly notes that the work was "the first piece of art music to use the word jazz in its title," but he seems to question its jazz credentials because it "owes far more to Spanish dance music. .. than to the hot jazz that had taken Chicago by storm" (190). Musicologist Charles Hiroshi Garrett devotes a chapter of his book Struggling to Define a Nation to Jelly Roll Morton and the Spanish tinge. He likens the origins of jazz as "to a musical gumbo, the product of a creative collision that was centered in the city of New Orleans" and directly related to the Creole culture so influential there. 1 Spanish, Latin, and Caribbean sounds and rhythms were original ingredients in the jazz gumbo, not afterthought seasonings: John Alden Carpenter got that right. Everyone interested in twentieth-century American music culture can learn from Savran's boundary-crossing book. His perspective from outside the confines of music scholarship brings fresh insights to our understanding of the cultural contests at work on multiple levels of society, and especially to those being enacted on stage. Highbrow/Lowdown underscores the intimate and sometimes contentious relationships tying together music and what Savran believes to be the closest of her sister arts, theater.