Langston Hughes, great writer and poet, was also a jazz fan.
The big problem with this book is that it provides, at best, a severely truncated and tendentious history of the music. One chapter gives a cursory overview of several developments in the 1950s. The final chapter covers the remaining 40 years in a slim, almost perfunctory twenty or thirty pages. Perhaps the book should have been titled "Jazz: The First 50 Years."
Geoffrey C. Ward & Ken Burns