ravi wrote:
>
>
>
> i see your point. was jazz in its various forms really popular
> during the jazz age or was it the casting of big band jazz as
> swing or other dance music that brought about its acceptance
> among a larger (and white) audience?
>
Someone on this list must know a lot more about this than I do, but I
can add a footnote or two to an account someone else will have to write.
:-)
My personal memory goes back almost far enough to comment on this. Jazz had practically disappeared from the view of the "larger public" (i.e., white mainstream) in the '40s & '50s. It was "brought back" by its use in a TV show called _Peter Gunn_, a private detective whose girlfriend played the piano in a supper club or something like that.
(Back in the '30s both the marxist critic Christopher Caudwell and the fascist poet Ezra Pound referred to Jazz as an indication of cultural decay.)
>From what I can vaguely recall of acquaintances in the '40s who thought
highly of jazz, their attitude twoards the culture that originated and
developed it and the black artists they listened to was viciously
patronizing. "Those people sure had rhythm" and the like.
Carrol