Jazz

No city in America can rival New Orleans for the number and variety of buildings from the Colonial and Antebellum era

Photographs by Edwin S. Grosvenor unless otherwise credited.

Brent Glass | Spring 2021

What African Americans could not achieve in the courtroom they did in the dance hall, with the invention of a rebellious, and wholly American, new musical artform.

Editor's Note: Brent Glass is Director Emeritus of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and the author of 50 Great American Places: Essential Historic Sites Across the U.S., from which this essay is adapted.

Jazz Delights the World

Ryan Reft | Fall 2018 - World War I Special Issue

During the World War I, American jazz bands played at hospitals, rest camps, and other venues, delighting doughboys and Europeans alike.

Jazz and America

Gary Giddins | December 2000

Geoffrey C. Ward, writer of a major new book and 19-hour documentary on the subject, discusses the joys and wonders of our native art form

Geoffrey C. Ward is no stranger to American Heritage, where he served as editor and later as a columnist.

Jazz Flourishes in Paris, Where Jim Crow Didn't Exist

Leslie Gourse | April 2000

American jazz musicians once enjoyed a freedom and respect in France’s capital that they could never win at home. Landmarks of that era still abound.

For all the books and films that have been done about painters and writers who went to Paris, far less has been written about the lives of musicians from the United States who settled there, some for a while, a few for their whole lives.

Billie Holiday

Geoffrey C. Ward | December 1994

In a sordid new biography, the great blues singer’s life has eclipsed her art.

Billie Holiday made hundreds of memorable recordings before her death 35 years ago, but she never liked any of them much: “... it’s always something that you should have done,” she told an interviewer.

The Diamond Jubilee of Jazz

John McDonough | February/March 1992

75 years ago this month, a not-especially-good band cut a record that transformed our culture.

About 325,000 jazz performances have been recorded for commercial release in the 20th century, according to the Institute for Jazz Studies, at Rutgers University. Thousands more have been taken from radio and concert events.

The St. Louis Woman of Paris

Geoffrey C. Ward | November 1989

The past keeps no secrets more securely than those of the stage.

Looking for the Pretty Notes

Geoffrey C. Ward | December 1988

There appears to be no limit to our interest in the private lives of unhappy artists.

Voices, Visions, and the Duke

Geoffrey C. Ward | February 1988

In his 1844 essay called “The Poet,” Ralph Waldo Emerson urged American poets to fashion a distinctive art from the facts of American life.

Congo Square

Frederick Turner | February/March 1982

An Inquiry Into the Origins of Jazz

Jazz endures in a special sort of American reserve. Accepted as a part of our national heritage, still it is as if the interior sound of this music prevents most of us from embracing it as fully as we have its derivatives, pop music and rock.

Benny Goodman

Richard M. Sudhalter | October/november 1981

An Interview With the King of Swing

Benny Goodman strolled down New York’s Second Avenue one recent morning, covering the nine blocks between his apartment and a health club, where he swims each day, in about ten minutes.

Crossword In History

October 1976

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.