The interdisciplinarity of the contributors emphasizes the fact that jazz, as stated above, was never only a music but rather was a music that served as a muse for an arts movement, enchanting and bewitching other creative artists to make and to critically examine their art: from novelists like Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Jack Kerouac, and John Clellon Holmes to poets like Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsburg, and Michael Harper to painters like Romare Bearden and Jackson Pollock to dancers like Fred Astaire, Agnes de Mille, Norma Miller, and Savion Glover and to hip hop and spoken-word artists like the Roots, Kendrick Lamar, and Beyoncé.
This issue of Dædalus explores both the legacies of jazz and its futures from the perspectives of artists and academics engaged in multiple fields of study. The interdisciplinarity of the contributors emphasizes the fact that jazz, as stated above, was never only a music but rather was a music that served as a muse for an arts movement, enchanting and bewitching other creative artists to make and to critically examine their art: from novelists like Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Jack Kerouac, and John Clellon Holmes to poets like Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsburg, and Michael Harper to painters like Romare Bearden and Jackson Pollock to dancers like Fred Astaire, Agnes de Mille, Norma Miller, and Savion Glover and to hip hop and spoken-word artists like the Roots, Kendrick Lamar, and Beyoncé. The essays in this issue critically examine the achievements of jazz as an artistic movement through historical case studies, engagement with contemporary jazz innovations, and projections of the art form’s future. A mixture of historical reckoning and utopian possibility bracket the ever-changing character of jazz now.