Word: kuhne
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Between World Wars, Strauss prospered in the Wall Street investment banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Named an AECommissioner by Harry Truman in 1946 after serving as a deskbound rear admiral in World War II, he won a reputation for independent hardheadedness by pushing for an H-bomb program in 1949 against the combined opposition of his fellow AECommissioners and the physicists of the General Advisory Committee. Strauss won that bitter fight (with invaluable help from Physicist Edward Teller) just in time to keep the Soviet Union from gaining an H-bomb monopoly. After 1953, as Eisenhower's AEChairman...
John Harbison, the other music major with a "feel" for the jazz idiom, works in a wider sphere than Kuhn, playing both modern and dixie piano, and this year conducting the Bach Society Orchestra. John's major complaint is that "most fellows don't get to play enough, and only Steve has had time to find a style of his own. Two years ago there were Sunday sessions in the Union, but no more...
...that time there were "workshops" at Adams House--a series of Sunday afternoon sessions, where students could play some jazz, or just listen. Kuhn acted as technical adviser at the workshops and feels they were "rather successful." "A lot of people had a chance to play, and some learned something. It folded last year when Beckwith graduated." Although many jazzmen miss the workshop sessions, no one has filled the void with initiative...
Neither Harbison nor Kuhn feel there is deep interest at Harvard in modern jazz, and they point to the adverse criticism voiced over the Buck Clayton session at last year's Jubilee. (This year's replacement--Lionel Hampton and the Australian Jazz Quartet--reveals a shift to the commercial side of the jazz world.) John rates the students a shy and unsophisticated audience, who know too little of the modern style to really like it. "Progressive jazz demands concentration. It's intense, and you can't have glasses clinking all the time. There's a meanness to the music that...
During this same period the Adams House activity began, and a student emcee, Tom Wilson, conducted several popular Sunday afternoon sessions. Tom now works with Transition Records, and voices complete optimism over the future of jazz at Harvard. He feels the receptions given Dorfman, Kuhn, and the HNJS concerts adequately reveal how high jazz interest runs on campus; and he envisions Harvard as a thriving jazz center after a few years of jazz-education. "It's important to introduce jazz to the student...