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Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't : Jazz and the Making of the Sixties
Freedom Is Freedom Ain't Jazz and the Making of the Sixties Author:Scott Saul 25th Annual American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation Honorable Mention Best Book Prize of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music In the long decade between the mid-fifties and the late sixties, jazz was changing more than its sound. The age of Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, and ... more »Charles Mingus's The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady was a time when jazz became both newly militant and newly seductive, its example powerfully shaping the social dramas of the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement, and the counterculture. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't is the first book to tell the broader story of this period in jazz—and American—history. "The principal musicians [Saul] explores are figures like Charles Mingus, John Coltrane and Max Roach, but he bucks the biographical norm by placing the music within the wider intellectual milieu of writers, critics and visual artists that instinctively felt the urgency of jazz, even if some responded in a wrongfooted way … Tension between individualism and the safety net of mass culture is the prevailing theme of this original and thought-provoking piece of writing." —Philip Clark, The Wire« less