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MODERN TRENDS |
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ground of big business. In Britain alone, at the time of writing, over sixty million popular gramophone records are sold each year—the sales graphs of gramophone companies since the end of World War II have been shooting up like Jack's beanstalk. Naturally, this has affected jazz.
Any specialist book on modern jazz trends is apt to be tiring reading. There are enormous collections of names, of influences and 'schools', of groups who experiment with new sounds and new forms and who rocket to stardom on gramophone records if their particular new sound 'catches on5. Then they (often) modify their policy to suit the financial interests of the gramophone company concerned; and a howling duel emerges between jazz devotees who accuse their former idols of vulgar commercial pranks on the one hand, and on the other hand Joe Public who says he is delighted with the result anyway, and please leave him alone.
If you read the specialist jazz *books and journals, you are bound to come up against this bitter controversy: is 'head'jazz, written jazz, Europeanised jazz really 'jazz' in the strict sense at all? There is a great deal of special pleading on either side; and I would recommend the reader of this book, before he plunges into these heated arguments, to hear all kinds of jazz and swing and try to make up his own mind.
Experiments in Jazz It may help to clear the picture if we try to get a |
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