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Read other letters about this article
No, no, no! Jazz is wonderful, beautiful, passionate music. In a hundred, two hundred years from now jazz will be resurrected as fresh as ever, but rock will be forgotten, dead and buried, just as the great jazz artists are today.
I am the world''s number one jazz enthusiast and listen to jazz every day of my life, but I still disagree with nearly all of your article.
The fact is that jazz WAS the popular music of America during the jazz age and the jitterbug era.
Louis Armstrong was greeted when he arrived at the train station in Copenhagen, Denmark in 132 by 10,000 cheering fans throwing flowers and garlands--though thirty years later in the US he still had to sleep in the van due to segregation.
Clarinettist Artie Shaw (1910-2004)is my favorite jazz player. I listen to his music almost daily. It is like a drug. He was a good looking musical virtuoso who was the rock star of his day. He married Lana Turner and Ava Gardner, and other wives.
By 1990 he had sold 100 million records. He had seven gold records including Beguine the Beguine, Stardust, Frenesi, Moonglow, Summit Ridge Drive. Frenesis was the #1 hit single of its day for 13 weeks.
After World War II the big band scene started to fall apart.
Shaw had a wonderful big band in 1949 but it was a complete flop. Audiences wanted him to play his hits so they could jitterbug, Shaw wanted to play music that was good to listen to. Shaw hated being a pop star, he hated the music business. The music was superb [Artie Shaw And His Orchestra 1949], but no one wanted to listen.
Many jazz players started to play bebop, a type of jazz that focuses on individual virtuosity on the instrument, and audiences fell away in droves.
Shaw made some quite wonderful small group recordings that are hardly available today. [Artie Shaw Last Recordings Rare and Unreleased & More Last Recordings Rare and Unreleased] which are a brilliant testament to his musical ability, then he laid down his clarinette and never picked it up again. He turned to writing.
He hated the music business that much.
The invention of hi-fi recording and the long playing record gave jazz a fillip in the early fifties and many of the great big band figures recorded extended versions of their greatest music with smaller groups. Albums like Duke Ellington's Masterpieces by Ellington, Goodmans BG in Hi-Fi, Side By Side with Johnny Hodges and Ellington, the Ella Fitzgerald Songbooks, the duets with Ella and Louis Armstrong, great albums by Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Wes Montgomery, Tal Farlow, Milt Jackson, Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Sun Ra were laid down for posterity and are still wonderful listening, but by 1960 jazz was practically dead.
Part of me secretly thought that jazz was a little, well, square. At its worst, it just seemed to be a bunch of technically proficient middle-aged men taking turns soloing on schmaltzy old tunes.
Miles Davis continued to record and had great name recognition, and many of the jazz musicians who were still standing played concerts on the college circuit in the late 60's. I saw Roland Kirk playing three horns at once with a flute up his nose. Great fun, but his recorded output is poor.
I saw Louis, I saw Mingus, I saw Sun Ra.
But now they are all gone. Jazz flourished for about thirty years--from the mid twenties to the mid fifties-- and then it faded away.
Jazz is America's greatest treasure and its neglect is a huge scandal. If I had my way it would be played 24 hours a day in all federal buildings, prisons, and customs halls too, to remind new arrivals what this country is about.
