Riffs: Random Reflections on Jazz, Blues, and Early Rock

In 1938, 30 years before the civil rights movement, Benny Goodman, the legendary White jazz clarinetist, brought on stage at Carnegie Hall in New York City a jazz orchestra that included pianists Teddy Wilson and Count Basie, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, saxophonist Lester Young, and half a dozen other Black musicians. This outrage to the acceptable that demolished segregation, if only for one night, was the starting point of a phenomenon that could never be undone by legislation because it...