Jazz

[Justin Schwartz]

These are the kind of irritating snob remarks that on hand induce the 
Lincoln Center crowd to pretend that jazz is classical music, so "serious," 
so of "real value," etc., and on the other hand to make us want to firebomb 
the symphony. I like classical music. I am a hopeless and proud elitist. I 
am a fan of high bourgeois culture. But I don't think that it proves that 
some music work has real value that it is played at the Philharmonic by a 
bunch of people in evening clothes, or that it doesn't because it was played 
at a club by a drug addict (and how do you know about those classical 
musicians and composers, anyway?) or by a dance orchestra with crass 
commercial motivation. Jazz is not classical music, but Armstrong, 
Ellington, and Parker are as good as music gets--as good as Bach or 
Beethoven, each in their own way. --jks


>
>John Halle wrote:
>
>>Of course, the pwog-left has long
>>since given up on classical music as it is just ever so terribly elitist.
>
>Not me. I'm all for high bourgeois culture. I started listening to
>classical music as a youngster, and spent years studying it too. But
>after a while, I burned out on the canon - there's only so much
>really good stuff, and after 20 years, you've heard it all a million
>times. You can always unearth an obscure toccata by an obscure
>Silesian, but it would probably be an upscale form of easy listening
>(which is no doubt what the Prince who commissioned it was looking
>for).
>
>The culture surrounding jazz has always mystified me. Though it's a
>kind of "popular" music, there's an air of painfully high seriousness
>among
>afficionados. Jazz DJs assume a tone of almost funereal reverence
>when they identify what they've just played, and read the name of
>everyone associated with the recording except the janitor who swept
>the studio. It's like they're trying soooo hard to be taken seriously
>that you almost suspect them of a cultural anxiety about not being
>really serious. I mean, not everything has to be on a par with the
>Hammerklavier sonata.
>
>Doug

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