The New Jazz Audience

An exciting new kind of jazz is being played in America today. And it is creating a new kind of jazz audience.

Jazz is distinctively American music. It was born in the Deep South and spread from there throughout the rest of the country and then throughout the world. In the beginning, it was played in the honky tonks, brothels, and lowest sort of dives. There was a time when respectable people would have nothing to do with the music. But as jazz grew, so did its audience.

In the beginning, an important function of jazz was to express repressed emotions. A jazzman, who often couldn't read music, blew his feelings through a horn. As jazz grew, it became more complicated; the men who played jazz became more expert with their instruments. Big band jazz required putting the notes down on paper. In our own quartet the arranged material serves as a cohesive introduction and ending to form a skeletal framework, leaving the body of the piece free to develop. Its limitations are set only by the self-imposed limitations of the improviser. Jazz has given us one of the greatest freedoms and challenges ever offered to any musical mind.

Modern jazz still has the important function of expressing emotions, but a great deal of the formal aspect of music has been added to it. Harmonically, melodically, structurally – contemporary jazz has advanced far. A few short years ago, people liked to dance to jazz and they liked to stamp and clap their hands to jazz. Today people like to do all of these, but realize jazz is as deserving of attentive listening as classical music. In fact, jazz is America's classical music.

I think courses in jazz should be taught at all colleges. The movement has started. Our quartet with Paul Desmond on alto sax, Box Bates on bass, Joe Dodge on drums, and myself on piano, has just completed a series of sixty concerts at colleges all across the country. The reception was wonderful. These kids are becoming musically aware: they understand what it is we're trying to do.

We try to bring our audience into the music we play. They help us to actually create the sounds they are hearing. Our music is complicated and elusive. Our audience must use their imaginations to the same degree as the performer uses his imagination.

Audiences differ, of course. All audiences are mixed in their desire for style. Some are only interested in whether we swing or not. Some just want to hear the counterpoint: some don't care about the counterpoint–they just want to feel the drive of the emotion behind our playing. You have to reach all these people.

A few progressive jazzmen don't give a damn about their audiences, because the people don't understand everything being played. That's ridiculous. A musician needs people–he needs the spark only an audience can give him. People have to be conditioned to good music, just as they've been conditioned to the mediocre. That's part of what I hope to accomplish. If I can reach these people and make them understand what it is we are trying to do and say with our music, then I'll be a very happy guy. I've been giving a lot of thought to television, as a way of reaching large numbers of people at one time.

I believe that if you represent a cultural mdium, you should represent all (concluded on page 14)New Jazz(continued from page 9) of it and not just a segment. I try to encompass all of the human emotions through the medium of jazz. I think that jazz is one of the strongest forces that exists in the world today. It's quite possible that it's the only truly American art form. At any rate, it certainly represents freedom, the right to be different, the right to be an individual.

One of the first things a totalitarian government does is ban jazz. You didn't find any jazz in Hitler's Germany. Try to hear jazz in Russia. A short time ago Germans from the Russian zone risked imprisonment to hear Louis Armstrong in Berlin. Who in the State Department can reach the people of Europe as Louis Armstrong did? His personality and his horn personify Freedom–a political and artistic freedom unknown in a totalitarian state. People may not care to listen to a politician from another country talk about the "American Way," but they'll walk miles to hear a good American jazz band. The history of the United States is all wrapped up in this crazy, wonderful music. It's blue, gay, happy, sad, but always free.

I guess that's the single biggest thing I'm trying to prove when I play. I can sit at the piano every night and the music I create is my own. No one can tell me that I've got to play it differently. No one can change a note. And people leave a club after hearing me play and they know they've seen a guy who can be himself, a completely happy, uninhibited man.

I believe many of our limitations are self-imposed. The world is full of talented people. The extent to which they realize self-expression depends on how much they refuse to compromise and conform: how they uphold their own integrity.

Jazz is alive in America today: alive and growing. I'm happy to be a part of that growth.