The obsession of the novel's characters with degrees of skin colour, or the lack thereof, threatens to force the heroine, a near-white black, to call off her planned marriage to a white jazz musician and instead to encourage the crude advances of a nut-brown man with three daughters.

ECONOMIST: Dorothy West

For the first minute or so of "Like Someone in Love" black screen, white titles, jazz piano you could mistake this mysteriously beautiful meditation on the ways of love for a film by Woody Allen.

WSJ: Film Review: Like Someone in Love

White musicians who started playing jazz included Papa Jack Laine, Sharkey Bonano and Nick LaRocca.

BBC: The birthplace of jazz

He claimed that jazz was invented by white musicians and that black musicians would never play as well.

BBC: The birthplace of jazz

As clarinet player and scholar Michael White points out, New Orleans jazz arose out of turbulent times in the early decades of the twentieth century, and these post-Katrina years are turbulent times, too.

BBC: RELATED BBC SITES

Another older Shinjuku gem is Jazz Pub Michaux, a bar whose white-bearded, kimono-and-Mongolian-cap-wearing 76-year-old owner has 4, 500 records of hard-bop and soul-jazz, including a large collection of rare vinyl by artists like Baby Face Willette and Groove Holmes.

BBC: Tokyo��s jazz kissa survive