What We Are Reading Today: Dangerous Rhythms

What We Are Reading Today: Dangerous Rhythms
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Updated 21 September 2022
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What We Are Reading Today: Dangerous Rhythms

What We Are Reading Today: Dangerous Rhythms

Author: T. J.  English

T. J.  English’s dangerous rhythms tells the symbiotic story of jazz and the underworld: A relationship fostered in some of 20th century America’s most notorious vice districts.

By offering artists a stage, the mob provided opportunities that would not otherwise have existed. 

Even so, at the heart of this relationship was a festering racial inequity.

The musicians were mostly African Americans, and the clubs and means of production were owned by white men. it was a glorified plantation system that, over time, would find itself out of tune with an emerging civil rights movement.