A Guide to Soul Jazz, Which Used Black Music History to Speak to the Present and to Build the Future

"Jazz, like all popular music, is in and of the world—responsive to its conditions. In the late 1950’s, as the civil rights movement was rising, East Coast jazz musicians were asserting their Black identities through the music they made. 'There is in the music a new note of racial pride,' Lerone Bennett, Jr. wrote in a 1961 article for Ebony. That pride included a deliberate reaching back, a reassessment of 'the Negro folk idiom—the cries, chants, shouts, works songs, and pulsating rhythmic vitality of gospel singers and shouting choirs. […] [They] turned from the academy and faced the storefront church.' This was a powerful way to be seen. Reaching back into the history of Black music to assert that it, like the more 'refined' jazz sounds, was as important to shaping the music as anything else. ..."
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