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Writers have often portrayed the history of jazz as a narrative of progress. Their accounts show jazz evolving from a boisterous type of dance music into forms of increasing complexity, gradually rising in prestige to become an artistic tradition revered around the world. Certainly attitudes towards the music have changed dramatically. In 1924 an editorial writer for The New York Times called jazz ‘a return to the humming, hand-clapping, or tomtom beating of savages’; in 1987 the United States Congress passed a resolution designating jazz ‘an outstanding model of individual expression’ and ‘a rare and valuable national American treasure’. In keeping with this general theme of progress, historians hav