Iain Anderson. This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture. (The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2007. Pp. 254. $39.95

This is Our Music is the title of an album released in 1960 by the Ornette Coleman Quartet. Coleman, an African American alto saxophonist, had endured years of ridicule by musicians and audiences for improvising on a plastic toy instrument, producing rough-edged tones, and using unconventional chord changes. In 1960, though, Coleman became the toast of Manhattan's jazz scene. Sympathetic critics called him the prophet of free jazz, music's “new thing.”

Borrowing its title from the album, Iain Anderson's study uses Coleman's story to begin an exploration of free jazz in American culture. Before 1945 jazz was commercially popular, and enthusiastic young critics emerged from the ranks of its fans, but it won little praise from the critical establishment or support from arts organizations. Before World War II jazz signified pride and even social protest to urban African Americans,...