Hi CharleyI'm responding to your very welcome feedback on my book from my main email address. I'll respond to the points you make in both your emails in one goCrouch did make a very good point, didn't he, about blacks and Jews embracing the possibilities inherent in urban life? Jews had little or no reason to look back with affection on lands they had come to America from: by comparison, the New World was a release despite the bigotry they had to contend with. Young 1st generation Jews such as Gershwin had every reason to embrace modernity, which in America was very interconnected with jazz or at least people's perception of itWhy are Jews so intrigued by foreign and exotic cultures? Hmm, perhaps because in the last 2000 years Jews have been a diaspora people, assimilating middle eastern, east European, southern European, Balkan, Gypsy, western European, Latin and American and African-American influences, in many case fusing that with Jewish cultures. Kurt Weill - I may do a special edition of my Kosher Jam radio show dedicated to him and by jazz interpretations of his music. I've already done one on Gershwin, and also want to do one on Arlen, and also a more general edition on Jewish songwriters. Picking up on the theme of your book about entitlement to play jazz, I think the fact that the vast majority of jazz standards were composed by Jews, and I think it can be argued had a role in the way jazz evolved, including other jazz standards based on the chord changes of those songs, means that Jews perhaps more than any non-black group surely can claim some title.Also, if much of black music, while dealing with life's blues, is also a life-affirming way of exorcising them, then Jews as a historically outside and much oppressed and racially reviled group can certainly associate with the music in more than just an intellectual aesthetic levelAlso, as David Izenson, one of Ornette's white bassists put it, “I have a few thousand years of tradition to contribute myself. Since I’m white and Jewish, perhaps a Jewish guy is going to realise when he sees me up on the stand with black musicians that this new music has something to do with him.” And if we move it to blues music, Peter Green said something along the lines that, "As a Jew, you can put a lot of your own feeling in"The way I see jazz, pretty much from its inception, is, as I've put in Jazz Jews, it's "a coat of many colors, the dominant thread of which is black". Most of the greatest jazz innovators have been black, in terms of the musicians that have radically moved the music on, that doesn't always mean that they are always the greatest musicians. I mean, my favorite tenor saxophonist is probably Getz, awesome technically but much more importantly, also expressively, but he's nowhere near the influence on jazz that Coleman Hawkins or Lester Young or Coltrane are. All of whom are of course fabulous, but Getz is my pick. And I would reject any suggestion that that's got anything to do with me being white, or because Getz was Jewish. I mean, I've seen a lot of blues/R&B gigs in my time, and listened to a whole lot more, white and black, and the greatest musicians in that genre - Howlin Wolf, Jimmy Reed, Professor Longhair and so on - to my ears are definitely black