In With The In Crowd
Mike Smith
232 Pages
ISBN: 978-1496851154
University Press of Mississippi/Jackson
2024

There is a legal adage that hard cases make bad law. Extreme circumstances make it difficult to accommodate less fraught or complex situations. Histories of jazz in the United States can be a bit like that. Controversial subjects, players or recordings can obscure the importance of less extreme ones. Lord knows, jazz in America has had more than its share of extreme, divisive, or just plain difficult players and performances.

Mike Smith's valuable book provokes an acute perspective of thinking. While his subject is the long-standing tension between art and commerce: "How can something commercially successful also be high art?"—Smith goes well beyond that. He deals with a cultural expression of race and follows it through some of the most complex political times in modern American history. Who decides what is important in the history of jazz? What is the role of mass markets and especially, of popular black taste in establishing what music succeeds, much less matters? How does a white power structure distort the resulting narrative? Is a balanced view even possible? Good questions.

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