First Sentence

"I suggested in my introduction that evolutionary accounts of jazz history need to be interrogated for the ways in which they elide the music's history of involvement in the formation of social identities and their attendant forms of privation and struggle This chapter, I feel compelled to admit, grew out of just such an evolutionary account, for when I began working on this project (or an earlier version of it) more than a decade ago, I myself sought to map out the ways in which the harmonic vocabulary of jazz had evolved from its early forms of diatonic realism into a modernism of atonality."