Sidney Bechet ranks among the greatest of the early masters of Jazz, up there with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie. Born of a Creole family in New Orleans, and very conscious of the evils of slavery, his genius flowered at an early age. He is acknowledged as the greatest player ever ...
Look We Have Coming to Dover! Nagra, whose own parents came to England from the Punjab in the 1950s, draws on both English and Indian-English traditions to tell stories of alienation, assimilation, aspiration and love, from a stowaway's first footprint on Dover Beach to the disenchantment of subsequent generations.
Rhodes grants the truth of appearances to the clichés of the Jazz Age - the lost generation of writers, the era of mass consumption and the silver screen - while revealing their roots in a conservative ideology which sustained Republican rule.