[Dixielandjazz] Ellington Teagarden Lyttelton

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I don't suppose anybody who takes any music seriously actually believes 

de gustibus non disputandum 
in the common reading of the phrase as meaning that no work of art can be 
regarded as superior to any other. 

The Latin phrase is just a cheap way of stopping people from fighting

People frequently think they are disagreeing about music because they don't 
appreciate that the music anyone likes listening to is a matter of what he or 
she is interested in musically, emotionally. There is very little to some music, 
and nothing much to be interested in there. It's shallow and suits shallow 
interests. 

There is a great deal to some other music, but just because it's of considerable 
worth and contains a lot, that's no reason why everybody would share an interest 
in it. 

Music is NOT THE INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE of everybody
It can be an international language, but there are boundaries and limits. 
such boundaries can be set up when something tawdry and shallow is fed to 
people, even under the name Dixieland, and they don't know that some music 
bearing that label has actually a content worth listening for


Humphrey Lyttelton observed in one of his excellent books recounting his 
listening experience that some hreat jazzmen have been startlingly 
unappreciative of some others. He calls this the research scientist mentality. 

Thus Jack Teagarden just wasn't interested in Ellington -- and I suppose he 
didn't really manage to say why. 

Probably he was preoccupied with his own musical objectives, just as Coleman 
Hawkins was when he came back from Europe and couldn't share a lot of people's 
feelings about Lester Young,

It was actually Mahler, not Bruckner, who used Frere Jacques, incidentally. 
And if you look back to the lifetimes of these two you can find other examples 
of people not being interested in the feelings being expressed, and/or not 
understanding the music, and mistaking their absence of a positive response for 
a judgment of the music. 

And this group is worth being a member of because its members take seriously 
some music which is worth taking seriously. Rudi Blesh would have been a real 
menace if he made people go, not blind, but deaf...