Jazz and the Jazz Age by Daniel Hardie

Jazz and the Jazz Age: Searching for Meaning in a Word is Daniel Hardie's sixth book about early jazz in 20 years. His previous titles, Exploring Early Jazz (2002), The Ancestry of Jazz (2004), and the Birth of Jazz (2006), give you an idea of his focus on the origins of the music, particularly the Bolden era in New Orleans, and the diaspora of New Orleans musicians, both white and black, that preceded the recordings of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917. His most recent work before the present edition, Jazz Historiography: The Story of Jazz History Writing (2013), instead gets at the original sources, the people that during the jazz age and later created the story we learn today. That book deeply informs this one, which attempts to ask the question, what did jazz mean to people living through the 1920s? His past research is drawn upon to tell the story of jazz in the public imagination of the 1920s, "The Jazz Age." While he sometimes goes forward as far as the 1940s to highlight how our own conception of the period was formed, he primarily relies on first hand accounts from the twenties, asking as they might have: What is good jazz? Where did it come from? How does it relate to the fast pace of modern times? As a comparative history of what people in the 1920s felt jazz was and what it meant in the big picture the book largely fails. The focus is too much on actual rat