Jazz: Hot and Hybrid. By Winthrop Sargeant. Arrow Editions. $5.00
American Jazz Music. By Wilder Hobson. W. W. Norton. $2.50
Considering the extraordinary extent to which the jazz language has passed into common currency it is singular how completely criticism has been concerned with the social and moral implications of its speech to the exclusion of philological study of the tongue itself. Careers and personalities of its leading orators have been portrayed in florid detail, its lively vocabulary of colloquialisms and expletives has been exploited and condemned with equal gusto, but there have been few adequate attempts to examine its verbal techniques, fewer still to analyze its basic principles of phonology, accidence, and syntax.
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