This Music is Climate Controlled

Critical Reaction to the African American Vanguard in Post War Jazz, 1945–1957

Abstract

The United Sates has long lived by historian Henry Steele Commager’s sentiment that ‘America was born of revolt, flourished in dissent, and became great through experimentation.’ Yet it is striking that the process of avant-gardism, perhaps the most crucial constant in twentieth century modernism, has not been used to describe African American intellectual history as it pertains to the arts outside of one relatively short-lived albeit highly contested period in American music history, 1957-1971. I have written elsewhere on the events, movements and moments that brought an African American musical vanguard to fruition as a group manifestation and an organizing device for those artists seeking artistic freedom expression, refuge in which to work, and fraternal assistance. (2003: 99-114; 2004: 31-38) This essay identifies the musical and extra-musical precursors out of which the often misunderstood avant-garde grew.