“Civic Jazz asks us to expand our understanding of what it means to say that jazz is an American art form. While Clark is clearly a fan, with an intimate knowledge of jazz, its culture, and community, this book offers more than anecdote and description, which is so common in jazz studies. Rather, this well-crafted book extends and offers a theoretical basis to the idea, put forward by Wynton Marsalis, Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, and most recently Barack Obama when speaking at the 2016 International Jazz Day Concert, that jazz expresses the American spirit. Clark finds his theoretical armature in Kenneth Burke’s blurring of the boundary between rhetoric and poetic. As Clark argues, Burke’s works articulate a rhetorical theory of aesthetics that is centered on the dispositional effects of form. Furthermore, and precisely because form is not restricted to the language arts, Burke’s rhetorical aesthetics are singularly appropriate to a study of the civic role of jazz.”