Ugly Beauty: Jazz in The 21st Century
Phil Freeman
250 Pages
ISBN: 978 1 78904 632 8
ZerO Books
2022

There is a scene in Douglas Adams' book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Pan Books, 1979) where a computer named Deep Thought is about to reveal the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, having crunched the numbers for a mind-boggling 7.5 million years. To a large, excited crowd, headed by two philosophers, Deep Thought declares—after a dramatic pause—that the answer is forty-two. 'Forty-two!' echoes one of the shell-shocked philosophers. 'I think the problem, to be quite honest with you,' says Deep Thought, 'is that you've never actually known what the question is.'

Jazz, like the meaning of life, means different things to different people. There has rarely if ever been consensus as to what jazz is, the values it represents, who owns it, or who should pay for it.

Jazz had not been around for long before the first schisms arose. Hot versus cool jazz. Swing versus bebop. Jazz as entertainment versus jazz as art music. America's little-appreciated classical music or the country's little-appreciated indigenous folk music? Those arguments are in the region of sixty years old, or more, and they continue to incite debate. So, what to make of jazz two decades into the twenty-first century?

Music journalist Phil Freeman raises a number of questions pertaining to the relevance of jazz in the twenty-first century, the weight of jazz history and tradition, the broadening of the music's vocabulary, notions of pan-African identity, and more besides. Two hundred and fifty pages later, the waters around jazz seem even muddier, and the debates—in certain quarters—appear likely to get even fiercer. But what also comes through as loud and clear as an