“Kevin Le Gendre, long-time music journalist, jazz expert, radio broadcaster and deputy editor of Echoes, has produced a meticulously researched, compassionate and sweeping opus of the history of black British music. It is also an extensive political, sociological and philosophical study of the story of racism that is hugely pertinent to our time. This is the first in a two-volume work beginning with the Middle Ages, and taking us up to the 1960s. It comprises the emergence of jazz, calypso and ska and the genesis of soul and everything in between.”
