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ITS FUTURE |
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Conover, who for several years has been broadcasting jazz records and interviews via the Voice of America. Conover writes:
"I assume the target date has no significance besides its built-in usefulness as a hook. Jazz 1984 is beyond Orwell's, Orson Welles*, or H. G. Wells* ability to predict. Too many roads are being built; you can't know where they'll lead to, this far ahead.
"One answer to the question: Jazz will be what people expect it to be.
"Let's try for a second, more specific answer. Today, we have our happy kids playing Chicago-styled 'Dixieland—and our solemn ones playing Oliver-and-Morton-styled *New Orleans.' Other youngsters adopt *bop' or 'cool* as the proper socio-musical attitude. The Swing Era band-styles are saluted and recalled in hi-fi. The British skiffle bands' repertoires include southern Negro blues-shouting and boogie-woogie piano melodies, note for note off the original records. And this may be good. It's not creative, it's something else. It's preserving the material as honorable compositions; the Yanceys, Pinetops, and Blind Lemons add their vitality, only once-removed, to the Chaminades of Sunday evening musicale.
"Julian 'CannonbalT Adderley, misadvertised as a new Bird but a hell of a fine musician, finding the Parker road a dead end, goes back a few blocks along the main highway to Pete Brown and Hodges and Carter, carrying what he can of the riches from Parker Road, adding some of what Wilder Hobson calls modern barrelhouse,' and making for himself a fresh point of departure.
"For the birdling seeking a direction, all these approved teachers' exercises are reliable signposts. While jazz, like a tree, extends branches and twigs, like a tree it keeps sending its roots deeper—to both coasts, Kansas City, Chicago, New Qrleans . . .
"A second answer to the question: Jazz will be partly what it was before. And partly what it wasn't. When people use a language, it changes; it changes them, too. Jazz is a language. It is people living in sound. Jazz is people talking, laughing, crying, building, painting, mathematicizing, abstracting, extracting, giving to, taking from, making of. In other words, living. It's not the only way people live, though all of life is in it, and it's as real as |
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