Esquire's World of Jazz [antikvár]

(i I' >,'ESQUIRE'S WORLD OF JAZZ/THE NATURE OF JAZZStop for a moment, and listen No matter where you are, chances are good that you'll hear music: a radio muffled through the walls, a jukebox, somebody whistling in the street. Listen a little closer, and the chances are about fifty-fifty that what you're hearing is American jazz.If you've always thought of jazz as nothing but the uproar that results when five or more musical illiterates punish instruments they cannot master, perhaps your only reaction to this will be to wish that jazz would go back to the cellars from which it came. But if, like us, you came down with jazz sometime in adolescence and have never quite recovered from it; if you remember the time when the very word meant something you do with a girl; if you crept into music shops, very much like a convert to a small and unpopular religion, to spend your hoarded pennies on the latest 78 release; if, to the dismay of your parents, you searched the radio night and day for the barest snatch of Lester Young, and a passion for Bix developed over the years into a reverence for Bird; if, in short, you've spent more time and more money than you care to calculate on an obsession that occasionally seems to take on the proportions of a vice then the very fact that jazz is there to be had at the flick of a wrist, or the investment of a dime, will seem amazing enough.But if, also like us, your experience of jazz in the Dark Ages before LP's was mostly associated with vaguely disreputable clubs somewhere downtown, and straight shots of bourbon, and the night side of life, you're liable to be surprised when you study the concert schedules in your newspapers, the summer music-festival announcements, and even the curricula of per-fectly respectable universities.For, these days, you are just as likely to find jazz being discussed in the planning division of the State Department as in the columns of Down Beat. The Voice of America probably broadcasts even more jazz than that swinging little station down near the end of the dial. Your bookstore has a shelf of volumes covering everything from the autobiography of Louis to the birth of bop. And, if your record dealer has heard of Vivaldi, he's probably hip to Gillespie as well.Something strange and wonderful has happened to. jazz. Whether you know it or not, you are living in the most exciting, most creative, and perhaps most crucial age through which our native music has ever passed.It is an age when Louis Armstrong makes an appearance at Lewisohn Stadium with members of the New York Philharmonic, and Friedrich Gulda does gigs at Birdland. It is an age when it isn't unusual for a jazz LP to sell over half a million copies. It is an age when clergymen discuss the religious significance of the blues, and psychiatrists find improvisation a symptom of the democratic urge. It is an age when Dizzy blows in Damascus, and Benny in Moscow; when that cello you hear is liable to be playing something by Mingus, rather than Mozart. At last jazz has been given full recognition as an art form.Art form? There are still some who may pull up short at that. They will point out that thousands are alive today who were born before jazz first raised its unruly voice somewhere in the southern part of the United States (there are now disputes as to just where it happened) some sixty-odd years ago (there are