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ITS FUTURE |
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everything. I think as long as the communications are bigger and as long as business is bigger, people will continue to have broader interests."
Though it was his concert at Carnegie Hall in 1938 that set a precedent for swing music as a concert medium, Goodman is not anxious to see jazz move entirely into the concert field. "My feeling is, it should always be with the dancers; but that's personal, that's completely biased. All the tunes that have ever meant anything have always had something to do with the dance in this country, it seems to me, and my feeling is that it should remain dance music. On the other hand, I suppose you can have both.
"You want to know what the jazz of the future will actually be like? Hmm. Well, here's a good simile: what will women be like?*
The youngest respondent in this symposium was Quincy Jones, who in 1984 will be younger than are Count Basie, Duke Ellington and other jazz stars of today. Jones is the only artist of those questioned who seems likely to remain in the jazz field, should it continue to exist, for another two or three decades.
"One of our biggest problems," says Jones, "is the question of what's going to happen to the audiences. Right now there are a few cultists who support jazz and buy record albums and so forth, but I wonder how many attitudes will be changed if jazz goes just where we want it to? If backgrounds for television shows and other situations like that become what we now call liip* and earn acceptance by every layman—will it still be progressive music or will it then become just popular music? In other words, if jazz becomes so widely used and accepted, then isn't it likely that it will just be considered popular music and the critics will go someplace else and find something farther out, more esoteric?
"Concerning the blending of classical and jazz forms, I don't go for it too much today—this business of jazz musicians' trying to compete with Hindemith and Stravinsky. There's really no competition at all. And the 12-tone scale may be new to us, but it's quite old-fashioned to the classical composer, so what we do with it is really a joke. It sounds very amateurish to try to write |
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