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Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa.

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Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa. By Ingrid Monson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. [xi, 402 p. ISBN: 9780195128253. $35.00.] Bibliographic references, illustrations, index.

In Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa, ethnomusicologist Ingrid Monson argues that jazz music and discourse about jazz during the civil rights era are inseparable from the racial politics of the time. Though writers such as Amiri Baraka and Franz Kofsky have turned to "free jazz" as the primary musical site for political expression in the period, Monson asks that we look and listen for politics in other, often more commercially popular forms of jazz, especially hard bop as performed by Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, George Russell, and many others. In this way, Freedom Sounds complements work by previous researchers of black popular music in the decades following World War II, even if (as I discuss below) Monson rarely positions herself in direct dialogue with those who have covered related territory in blues, rhythm & blues, soul, and even jazz.

Monson's great strength is her ability to map the changing political, social, and musical landscape through the perspective of musicians as they interact with activists, the media, and culture industry brokers. Through interviews, archival research, and analysis of recordings and performances we are given a sense of how performers--black and white--experienced structural differences based on...

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