I just finished teaching a 5-week course on jazz in the 1940s and examined in detail a decade's worth of music with fresh insights. The more I read jazz history and criticism about this decade the more disturbed I become about the jazz-is-black-music paradigm. I'm willing to accept someone's notion that Parker, Monk, Powell, Gillespie, Davis, and Roach are the most important musicians of the period, but there was a lot going on in music in the 40s. While bebop is inevitably regarded as black music, how can you talk about Charlie Parker's music without noting the roll-call of white pianists in his bands: Al Haig, Dodo Marmarosa, Richard Twardzik, Joe Albany, George Wallington? Bebop was just a part of the total soundscape, and the bebopper's ideology was shared by others. The African-American bebop innovators frequently asserted that they took their music seriously and wanted others to treat it as an artistic expression, not just entertainment. But they weren't the only ones in the jazz world to develop this attitude. The idea of taking what had been a popular music as an art form was developed by Stan Kenton in the same period. Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw had roles to play in spreading the word, too. As a historian I think it's more important to represent what was there rather than to focus only on what you like and admire. Stan Kenton's music with all its bombast is important to discuss simply because without Kenton's patronage the composers of film and television music of the succeeding decades (Pete Rugolo, et. all) might never have gotten their careers started. You don't like this music? As a jazz scholar that doesn't mean you can ignore it and pretend that it never existed and that it was without influence.