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'the dots' 49
secure, regular basis over which the melody spins variations which are never very long nor very involved in character and which never make any drawn-out demands on our faculty of concentration. One 'straight' critic goes so far as to tell us that jazz has a wide appeal because it combines "an easily repeated formula of melancholy, very welcome to the emotionally bankrupt, with the comforting reliability of a precise engine beat."
But if jazz were nothing more than that, how are we to account for the enormous esteem in which a character such as Louis Armstrong has been held for nearly forty years ? Or for the unstinted praise given to some of the best exponents of jazz by such a scholarly and sensitive musician as Ansermet?
No—there were greater possibilities in jazz, and it was inevitable that musicians should try to develop a range of expression wider than that of the traditional New Orleans style, whether by varying the orchestration of enlarging the harmonic vocabulary. Some of these developments were fruitful, others were mere money-spinning Box-Office gimmicks. But developments there had to be.
And on the "dots or no dots' controversy^ surely the soundest summing-up is that given by Rex Harris in his masterly book on 'Jazz' (see Appendix "C"): "Whether jazz musicians are able to read music or not is immaterial. Whether they gain financially by playing jazz is beside the point. The vital and essential crux of the whole question is whether they express |
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