The following is a guest post by Burgin Mathews, author of Magic City: How the Birmingham Jazz Tradition Shaped the Sound of America which is now available wherever books are sold. For much of the twentieth century, the city of Birmingham, Alabama, was home to one of American music’s most essential unsung communities, a thriving network of musicians whose lives helped shape the sound and soul of jazz as we know it. Nurtured in the social institutions of the city’s Black middle class, these musicians carved out a distinctive identity, forging an active tradition at...