Jonathan Leal is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California and coeditor of Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision.
“With Dreams in Double Time, Jonathan Leal proves he has ‘something to say.’ I use this phrase in the prosaic sense that he contributes new understanding and opens fresh areas of inquiry, and in the sense associated with a jazz musician’s solo. Almost every page treats readers to surprising revelation and provocation, and the figures Leal focalizes his history through are compelling as subjects on their own. This book is a tremendous achievement, a gift to readers seeking cultural history and methodologically innovative work.” -- Anthony Reed, author of * Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production * “In this fascinating and compelling book, Jonathan Leal works against the grain of jazz criticism by focusing on three relatively unknown figures for whom bebop proposed new ways of being in the world. Leal’s ‘trio,’ as he calls them, offer readers a glimpse into a much larger population of marginalized, often poor people of color who heard bebop as a radical, creative challenge to the totalizing singularity of what ‘white’ stood for during the second half of the twentieth century.” -- Ronald Radano, coeditor of * Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique *