JAZZ STUDIES Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity. By Paul Austerlitz. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. [xxii, 260 p. ISBN 08195-6781-7. $24.95.] Videography, discography, bibliography, index. We ask lot from jazz. To some commentators, is definitive of twentieth-century Americanness, with Ralph Ellison characterizing American life as jazz-based. To others, is epitome of musical avant-garde, indeed central to the great modernist tradition in arts (Alfred Appel, Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002], 7). During Cold War, was United States' secret sonic weapon, as touring musicians helped proselytize Third World domino countries to counter perceptions of American racism (Penny von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up World: Ambassadors Play Cold War [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004]). And in music's early decades, was at once, to many young white Americans, marker of earthy, streetwise hipness, and, to some cosmopolitan urbanites in other parts of Americas, emblematic of sophisticated North American savoir faire. Paul Austerlitz seeks to thicken this well-seasoned stew further with Jazz. Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity, which takes jazz's multivalence as foundational premise. The book's somewhat portentous title accords with Austerlitz's ambitious aims. The theoretical touchstone of his project is often-cited passage from W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk that casts African Americans as gifted with double born of their status as both black and American. As Austerlitz deploys concept, however, Du Boisian doubleness is actually tripleness: is African American, American, and transnational. These discrete but overlapping layers of identity are brought into dialogue through concept of consciousness, which Austerlitz introduces as something like Weltanschauung, or as he puts it, an awareness, mind-set, worldview (p. xiii). Jazz he argues in his introduction, creates virtual space where we can confront, learn from, and even heal contradictions resulting from social rupture (p. xvi). The book's odyssey very much tracks author's own, which he describes as a scholar-musician's journey. At very early age, Finnish-born Austerlitz moved to United States, where he grew up listening to both European- and African American-influenced musics. He later became active as saxophonist, clarinetist, and bass clarinetist and was inspired by Black Nationalist politics of free movement. Austerlitz, trained as an ethnomusicologist, is also an active performer and scholar of Latin music, with several publications on popular musics from Afro-Caribbean and especially Dominican Republic, including his first book, Merengue: Dominican Music and Dominican Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997). The various thematic strands of Austerlitz's biography-Afro-diasporic musicality and musical politics, intersection of and Latin American musical styles, Finnish cultural identity, relationship between musical and academic performative spaces-parallel structure, content, and argument of Consciousness. Austerlitz outlines book's theoretical framework in his first chapter, an exploration of the larger phenomenon of North American consciousness (p. 1). The windup to this pitch is slightly plodding survey of some fairly well-trodden terrain: difficulty of denning jazz and musicians' ambivalence toward label itself; social constructedness of American and African American national identities; and creolization in United States and its consequences. Austerlitz seeks to establish that in country whose diversity has produced both social antagonism and unparalleled opportunity for cross-cultural exchange, is singular vehicle for elevation of individual and collective consciousness. …