Ádám Havas is a Sociologist and jazz researcher based in Budapest, Hungary.
What a complex, brilliant little book! It's best to read it as * a tour de force in the ethnography of performing arts, putting the field of jazz in Hungary on the map of the social sciences world-wide, * a courageous renewal of the Bourdieusian dialect of sociology, from the sidelines of European bourgeois modernity, * an ethnography of the place of 'race' and identity as they appear in the cosmos of the creative arts, and dance in the double bind of Dirty Whiteness and (dis)privilege, * an insider-outsider take on the whirl of radically open-ended art, * an account of creative lives that vibrate between bebop inspirations and the burden of free idioms , negotiating the all-important informal scripts played in the Roma and assimilated Jewish scenes, and * a sparkling allegory for semiperipheral east-central Europe, a tiny universe of its own, forever in search of a sound-finding a voice that it can regard as its own. Jozsef Boeroecz, Professor of Sociology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA