Captain Swing

Eric Hobsbawm

  • The Duke Ellington Reader edited by Mark Tucker
    Oxford, 536 pp, £19.95, February 1994, ISBN 0 19 505410 5
  • Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America by David Stowe
    Harvard, 299 pp, £19.95, October 1994, ISBN 0 674 85825 5

In the élite minority arts of the 20th century, the US component is one of many, and by no means the most important. On the other hand, it penetrates, indeed dominates, the popular culture of the globe with the single exception of sport, which still echoes the British hegemony over the 19th-century era of bourgeoisie and the first Industrial Revolution, via tennis, golf and, above all, association football. So it is not surprising that what are generally accepted as the major North American contributions to the high culture of our century are rooted in popular and – the US being what it is – commercial entertainment: films and the music shaped by jazz.

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