Introduction: Things Ain't What They Used to Be? Race and Jazz Criticism

I n the "Arts & Leisure" section of the New York Times on January 3, 1999, the jazz trumpeter and critic Richard M. Sudhalter published the provocative article "A Racial Divide That Needn't Be."! The divide of which he speaks is between white and black in the jazz world. Sudhalter posits an "emerging orthodoxy" among jazz musicians and critics whose central tenet is that jazz, "especially in the formative pre-World War II days," is predominantlyor even wholly "African-American music" ("Racial" 1). He laments what he perceives to be white musicians' exclusion from and undervaluation in jazz history.