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Horizons: Jazz in 1984 |
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atonal things without any conception o£ basic composition, just for the sake of trying to be far out. That's not progress. It's like a classical composer hanging out in night clubs for a couple of nights and then trying to play bebop piano. I don't think it's a sincere effort of composition; there cant be any meaning when it's done by men who have so little real craftsmanship.
"What I hope will happen, though, is that symphony musicians' training in the future will have them better informed as to what has happened in jazz, so that when the guys are making a strong attempt to bring these two things together and combine the techniques, the orchestras will be better equipped. Contemporary writers nowadays listen to jazz, and I'm sure even a kid studying violin now, and studying Bartok, can't be unaware of what's happening in jazz. Probably the string section of the future will have a different terminology, a different notation to convey the subtleties of dynamics of jazz, even though the string musicians will be just as informed as jazzmen of things that have gone before, and will understand much more than the musicians today about matters of inflection and feeling. I know that in some string things that I did with Harry Lookofsky we had some notations of our own that we used to employ to make the strings swing.
"Eventually I think the two groups will simply be musicians-like for instance in Sweden, where a guy is just as familiar with a Ravel string quartet as he is with Lunceford's For Dancers Only. It will be wonderful if we get to a place where all the groups are speaking one another's language.
"This is my ultimate in the future of jazz. If there has to be a fusion of classical music and jazz, I think it will come in the day when there are capable soloists inside the symphony orchestra— when they have the same backgrounds. When everybody in the symphony orchestra can sit down and build, and have the same subtlety and looseness of rhythm. But it would have to come from the roots, and everybody in the orchestra would have to have those roots. If that happened, they would satisfy just as much as Duke Ellington—and that would be my idea of the perfect future for jazz." |
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