Jazz at the Crossroads

Extract

When it is considered that jazz is but half a century old, that it was only the spontaneous means of self-expression of a repressed minority, it is then that one wonders at its international acceptance. Surely, it must cater for some deep- seated hunger, for otherwise how could it have achieved such an acceptance?

Jazz, today, can be divided into three rough categories - traditional, mainstream, and modem. The traditionalists maintain that the old times were the best, and to persuade us that this is true they not only use the line-up of instruments fashionable earlier this century (banjo, cornet, even tuba), but also dress in the style of a bygone era, eras which have nothing at all to do with the genesis of jazz. One band dresses up in Confederate uniform, another as Mississippi gamblers, and one of the best known bandleaders, Acker Bilk, dons bowler and striped waistcoat. In the effort to project the potential listener back into the period, posters and advertisements are executed in a pseudo-archaic typographical style that often antedates all jazz by as much as a century.

The mainstreamers eddy midway between the traditionalists and the modernists, borrowing from both. No one has yet successfully defined mainstream. It uses a harmonic vocabulary more advanced than the traditional variety, more down to earth than the modernists. Mainstream is ideally suited to the middlebrow jazz listener. There is not so much of the plink-plonk of trad, nor the muffled profundities of the modernists.