When Genres Collide is a provocative history that rethinks the
relationship between jazz and rock through the lens of the two oldest
surviving and most influential American popular music periodicals: Down
Beat and Rolling Stone. Writing in 1955, Duke Ellington argued that
the new music called rock 'n' roll "is the most raucous form of jazz,
beyond a doubt." So why did jazz and rock subsequently become treated as
separate genres?
The rift between jazz and rock (and jazz and rock scholarship) is based
on a set of received assumptions about their fundamental differences,
but there are other ways popular music history could have been written.
By offering a fresh examination of key historical moments when the
trajectories and meanings of jazz and rock intersected, overlapped, or
collided, it reveals how music critics constructed an ideological divide
between jazz and rock that would be replicated in American musical
discourse for decades to follow.