Joel Dinerstein

writer & professor
race, music & cool

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My short narrative history of jazz!

September 03, 2020

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My short narrative history of jazz is now in the world, a story told through the music’s development in the Black neighborhoods of five American cities: New Orleans, Chicago, Kansas City, New York and Los Angeles. Jazz hides in plain sight at the birth of global culture.

Jazz is the original musical revolution that led to swing, soul, rock, funk, R&B, and hip-hop. The music’s history combines art, race, rebellion, and freedom into a veritable microcosm of American culture at its best and worst. God Bless America’s music critic, Ann Powers (NPR), for this blurb:

“Waltz for Debby,” from the Jazz Beauty playlist.

“It's hard to throw your arms around a universe, but Joel Dinerstein does so with grace and great insight in this essential guide to America's art form. Designed with maximum musical interaction in mind, it guides the reader by offering multiple views on jazz history —its relationship to cities, to Black migration, and to politics; its sonic evolution in streets, clubs and concert halls; its many personalities, from legends like Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis to central but less famous figures like Ben Webster and Hamid Drake. "Jazz is everywhere," Dinerstein declares. This kaleidoscopic little book proves that. A great addition to the shelf for a newcomer to the music or anyone who wants to enrich a lifetime of listening.”

And you can read it in an afternoon.

Dig in!

Joel Dinerstein is a professor of English at Tulane University, where he also holds a Sizeler Professorship in Judaic Studies. He is the author of a forth-coming memoir of his immi-grant Jewish family, The Last of the Ellis Island Jews (2026), and the founding editor of a new series, Lost Classics of Jewish Literature (UNO Press). His work focuses on compara-tive racisms through cultural resistance, whether anti-Semitism or anti-Black racism. His recent work emerged from two classes: (1) Jews & Race; (2) The History of Cool.

Dinerstein is a cultural historian and a renowned expert on the concept of cool, as featured in his TED Talk, “Why Cool Matters.” He published the first history of the concept in The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (2017), a work that shifted the paradigm of cool back to its origins in jazz, film noir, and existentialism, and away from its dismissal as a superficial tool of marketing. Dinerstein curated American Cool (2014), a popular culture and photography exhibit at the National Portrait Museum, and co-wrote its catalogue of 100 cool icons. His corporate study, Coach: A Story of New York Cool, is now a collector’s item.

Dinerstein is also a jazz scholar. His first book was an award-winning theory of jazz and industrialization — Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture Between the World Wars (2003) — and his most recent book is a short narrative history of jazz’s emergence in five urban Black neighborhoods, Jazz: A Quick Immersion (2020). He was a jazz DJ for a decade on WWOZ-FM in New Orleans, and he is currently a consultant to the New Orleans Jazz Museum.