Jazz is more serious than other genres - jazz requires exactly as much or as little expertise to listen to and appreciate as anything else

Jazz was born in New Orleans - it emerged almost simultaneously in a number of different communities

Jazz must swing - jazz artists are prone to experimenting with unusual time signatures

Jazz musicians were (or are) on drugs - early propaganda designed to paint black communities as dens of iniquity, and create reasons to arrest them

Jazz is dead - it’s integral to hip-hop and vibrant jazz scenes in Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Canada

"When a US blighted by racial unrest found itself needing to win a global propaganda war, a team of musical ambassadors was assembled. The result was anything but straightforward" - Guardian writes about “cultural presentations program – the effort to export American culture as a weapon in the fight against Soviet communism". A strange idea, a […]