[Dixielandjazz] oversimplification

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

one of the problems faced by jazz is the infantile oversimplification practised by hack journalists and tolerated unduly by too many musicians.  
I was taken once to see a documentary film about a blues club,in the middle of which there Archie Shepp and Ben Sidran prepared to deliver a tenor saxophone and piano duet -- based, said Sidran, on old piano blues...

BALLOCKS!!!  They proceeded to perform "Down the Road Apiece"  -- a 1940s pastiche by Freddie Slack.  I am quite sure that some of the support for the music at the centre of the discussions of this group comes from people who were around when a lot of more or less "Dixieland" got the sort of publicity pop music got, and that their not very inquisitive preferences are part of a block to wider appreciation of for instance the range of music about which Don Ingle can talk informedly at the drop of  a hat. 

I've found it interesting to listen to old beboppers, whose version of looking backward has involved only some of the music they played in the 1940s and 1950s, and where playing what was really the same music, as performed now also by various gifted and to some of us interesting young musicians, they have had other things in mind than they once did. They were less narrow, they didn't find themselves in the same states of mind as when things were different. The younger guys have been surprised that contrary to the cliches fostered by the creatures who market supposed uptodateness  they are playing music relevant to their own feelings. 
I'm sure Lee Konitz is rather weary of the blind faith in finding music in the discovery of how to handle an ever more sophisticated harmonic vocabulary acquired sheerly formally. 
From a friend who spends a lot of time in Latin America I've heard various expressions of scorn relayed by him by the successors of Hispanic musicians who fed intensively on what was going on in the USA in their day. The modern Hispanic musicians of South America tend to think US contemporaries gutless routiniers.
They don't know why they play all these complex things. It's habit, and as oppressive as the thousandth expression of hollow cheer merely to the strain of WHEN THE SAINTS...
Under some musical circumstances, no saint would enter, marching or dancing...