[Dixielandjazz] Listening to jazz

[Dan Augustine]

Folks--
     IS jazz art?  CAN it be art?  Or is it just a collection of both 
simultaneous and successive interesting sounds and structures?  I 
guess that depends on the person.
     If a jazz piece is, and cannot be, art, then once you have 
listened to it a number of times to grasp the new techniques it 
contains, it has nothing further to teach you.
     If, however, a jazz piece can be and is artistic to you, then you 
might be able to listen to it a hundred times over 50 years without 
tiring of it, still discovering and finding pleasure in things you 
hadn't heard before. One might say that the better the art-piece is, 
the more intense the pleasure and the longer one can hear it with 
pleasure.
     There are certainly recordings of bands and their tunes that i 
used to listen to 50 years ago, over and over, and now i never play 
them.  But there are other recordings (jazz and otherwise) i dust off 
every so often, and still get a kick out of them, almost the same as 
when i first heard them.  I bet i've heard Bach's Prelude in C Major 
500 times over the past 50 years, and just thinking about listening 
to it again quickens my interest.  Same for some early Turk Murphy 
songs.
     So, whatever floats your boat.  If you're tired of it, you're 
tired of it, but other people might never get tired of it.  One man's 
art is another man's garbage. But both have an equal right to their 
opinion. So it goes.

     Dan
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**  Dan Augustine     Austin, Texas    ds.augustine at mail.utexas.edu   **
**    "What survives every change of system is melody."               **
**                    -- Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)                  **
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