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In the nineteen-twenties, various composers, not a few of them French, set out to write music inspired by jazz. The idea was that jazz would serve as raw material for the ultra-sophisticated imagination of the classical flaneur. It did not occur to these brave explorers of the musical wilderness that jazz was a new art form that had no need to be elevated by the European mind. Their conception of African-American music was opaque at best, racist at worst. "These entertainments are not art," Jean Cocteau wrote in an influential manifesto. "They excite like machines, animals, landscapes, danger." A scant two years later, Cocteau was declaring that jazz was over. In the end, ...