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Vol. 25, No. 4: Here / Away

Jazz and the Magic City

An Alabama Diaspora

by Burgin Mathews

“From the heyday of swing through the dawn of bop, wherever there was jazz, there was some piece of Birmingham.”

This is the story of jazz in Birmingham, and of Birmingham in jazz—of how Alabama’s “Magic City” helped create some of the nation’s most swinging and celestial sounds, and of how that city, in the process, came to create itself.

This article appears as an abstract above, the complete article can be accessed in Project Muse
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