Word: modernizations
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
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...
...membership total of one hundred and fifty, split between jazz-players and jazz-lovers; and it sponsored the Friday nights at WHRB, as well as several forums on jazz and a "Hot vs. Cool" battle. It also scheduled concerts--all well attended--which brought Brubeck, Konitz, and the Modern Jazz Quarter to Cambridge. The group unfortunately disbanded when the original organizers left Harvard, and to date has not been revived...
Wilson is not alone in a feeling that Harvard should and will take the lead in any new movement having a certain intellectual character. "The West Coast experiments give modern jazz an intellectual aura, and this should rivet the Ivy Leaguer to the idea of jazz as an art form. What we need first is a different attitude in the Music Department. Then we need a club with a definite idea--a fixed purpose--and some means to endure when the original members leave. Once this attracts the Harvard market things will really move fast...
Strange that this condemnation includes modern art as well as modern life; strange, but in a way logical. For Berenson, connoisseur and aesthete that he is, represents a given area of taste, a given vintage. His taste reflects the refined tradition of Hellenism, of Classical proportion. In this way, Berenson looks dubiously upon both primitive art and on the creations of the modern idiom, the more naive frescoes of the twelfth century as the sophisticated manner of the modern French. Yet, what Berenson loves he loves well and completely. To the sphere of Athenian refinement, of what he calls "tactile...