Julia Hananel’s Reviews > The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America > Status Update

“Much the way bagpipes captured the spirit of Scotland, so ‘my contention about the music we play is that it is also folk music, the result of our transplantation to American soil, and the expression of a people’s soul just as much as the wild skirling of bagpipes denotes a heroic race that has never known the tone of foreign dictatorship.’” - Duke Ellington
Can’t recommend this book enough.