Ralph Gleason’s Artistic Activism

Sometimes, less really is more. The new compilation of Ralph J. Gleason’s writings about music and society, “Music in the Air,” issued this month by Yale University Press, would be twice as good a book at half the length. Gleason, who died in 1975, was one of the founders of Rolling Stone; before that, he was only one of the best writers about jazz and the host of the TV show “Jazz Casual,” which is the source of some of the most important extant clips of jazz luminaries. Only about half of the pieces in the book are of enduring value—but they’re among the most revealing and insightful writings about the sixties, and about American culture at large, that I’ve ever read.