prize17-6, Exercise 1: The recording ban

Model answer (check the details):

From 1942 to 1944 a musicians' union strike stopped most American recording, which happened exactly when the new style was taking shape. As a result there are almost no recordings of early bebop. A historian cannot simply listen to the earliest versions; they have to work from later recordings and from what people remembered, and memories are shaped by later fame and by the stories told afterwards.

Sources that can partly fill the gap: interviews and memoirs by the musicians, newspaper and magazine reports, club records, and any private or broadcast recordings that survive.

Care: say "almost no recordings" rather than "none", and treat each memory as evidence to be checked, not as a fact.