[Dixielandjazz] Amateur Jazz Critics, record collectors, fans

[Stephen Barbone]

List mates:

Don't you just love it when the armchair critics get going and tell us about
"Jazz", or jazz musicians? Perhaps that's why the music is slowly strangling.
Here's what OKOM trumpeter Max Kaminsky said about such things:

"The kind of music we played had a functional base. We played for dancing,
Before our time, jazz had been played in marching bands, in street parades,
at picnics, funerals, weddings. Before that jazz had evolved from blues and
work songs and from the churches. All this was in the music. It came out of
the raw stuff of life. But now, everything seemed to be changing."

"Jazz like Dr Frankenstein, had unwittingly created a monster in its own
image - -the jazz addict -- who is all hopped up about its significance as an
art form, and very nearly snuffed the life out of it. Jazz no longer belonged
to the musicians and the dancers. It was taken over lock, stock and barrel by
the fans, the jazz addicts, the record collectors, the amateur critics, the
recording companies, the promoters, the night club owners, the A & R men, the
lecturers, and the writers."

"These were the people who now decided what was jazz and what wasn't, who
dictated how it should be played and on what instrument, and specified who
could, or could not play "real" jazz."

As our Swamp Buddy Pogo, in the bayou country around New Orleans, would have
commented: "We have met the enemy and they is us."

Cheers,
Steve Barbone