Hearing Loss: The Dreamlife of American Jazz

Paul Anderson’s work in cultural history offers a new window into the world of modern jazz.  While prominent accounts of modern jazz’s musical and social worlds are often vanguardist and forward-looking, Anderson circles backward to explore alternative narratives in terms of retrospection, nostalgia, and loss.  Among other threads, his reconstruction of the dreamlife of modern jazz traces various efforts to repair the fraying ties between modern jazz and popular music in the 1950s and 1960s and pays special attention to the fate of the popular song form, especially the ballad, within the period’s creative tumult.