[Dixielandjazz] innovation

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

>Innovation is not the same thing as progress.
>says 
>-- Paul Edgerton


and some alleged novelties just ain't either of these 

though there is an elderly book called THE DEMON OF PROGRESS IN THE ARTS which seriously questions the assumption that overall progress is a possibility at all in artistic endeavours. 

Some music is better than other music, but not because it came later, at most because somebody knew what to do with an inheritance. 

Or as the late lamented Eddie Lambert said of the music of Sleepy John Estes, it's not pre-jazz, it's not pre-anything!  It is itself. 

Just to keep up the thread with the older blues much of whose musical character got misplaced with the arrival of electric guitar virtuosos, and with the admirable British jazz writers of fifty years ago, there is somewhere an amusing memoir by Pete Russell of his discovery of Estes recordings in 1944.  His family doubted his sanity, listening to that.  So different from the music which endeared Mendelssohn to Queen Victoria. 


Robert R. Calder