to write a short summary of the first 50 years of jazz music.
That was the original goal, the gap that my book was supposed to fill.
But i quickly realized that i couldn't write a history of jazz for an audience
that didn't know how jazz became what it was in the mid 1950s.
Therefore i decided
to write a short summary of the first 50 years of jazz music. Given that
i was already working on a history of blues music, the beginning of that
"summary" ended up being a lot more extensive than a mere summary should be.
Within two weeks i had written the first 15 chapters of this book, and
forgotten that the original focus was meant to be only the last 50 years
(the subsequent chapters).