Word: jazzmen
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...blundering against a window. Pleasant enough music can still be written within the old boundaries, but its most pleasing aspect is likely to be its very familiarity. In their continuing search for an escape into originality, classical composers sometimes reach toward jazz, and lately they have begun to meet jazzmen coming the other way-in search of respectability. Though both schools share an adventurous spirit and an unsmiling sense of high purpose, the temptation that rules their encounters with one another is an unhappy one: the urge to make a lady out of jazz...
...last year, Casimir's band began playing sit-down music in a club called Preservation Hall. Now, taking turns with other jazzmen of their greying generation, his Young Tuxedo musicians play to attentive audiences who come to tune students' ears to the originators of New Orleans jazz. For many players, though they have spent their lives in jazz, a job at Preservation Hall means the first real payday in a long time. The hall is managed by Allan and Sandra Jaffe, two jazz connoisseurs from Philadelphia, who run it as a labor of love. At the door, customers...
There is also resentment of the easy acceptance of such white jazzmen as Brubeck, Kenton, Mulligan and Shearing. In fact, notes Dizzy Gillespic, "colored musicians are simply resentful of the fact that in every sphere of American life the white guy has it better." The resentment is too often expressed in the refusal of Negro groups to hire white musicians. It has presented the jazz world with a critical problem in an already critical time-the number of jazz performers is increasing more rapidly than the number of jobs available...
...Message from Kenya (Art Blakey), Uhuru Afrika (Randy Weston), Africa Speaks, America Answers (Guy Warren), Afro-American Sketches (Oliver Nelson). Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite-We Insist includes tunes like Tears for Johannesburg, a lament for the Africans shot down in the Sharpeville massacre. To younger jazzmen, a great musician like Louis Armstrong is suspect-instead of hopping on the freedom bus he has been content to remain an "Uncle...
Colored Cats Bitched. For all that, most Negro jazzmen are as concerned as the whites about the effects of prejudice in either direction. Querulous Trumpeter Miles Davis has always insisted on hiring his musicians on talent only, although he concedes that "some colored cats bitched" when he added white Saxophonist Lee Konitz to his group. (In jazz argot, the pressure applied by Negro bigots to Negroes who will not subscribe to Crow Jim is called Crow Crow; its opposite is Jim Jim.) Says Negro Saxophonist Sonny Stitt: "Man. if a guy can play, that's all that counts...