Taking an active interest in jazz means improving the quality of the “sounds around us” – the level of musical quality, which implies, if there is any justification in talking about musical quality, the spiritual, intellectual, human quality – the level our consciousness.  In these time, when musical sounds accompany the take-off of a plane as well as a detergent sales pitch, the ” sounds around us” directly influence our way of life, our life styles.  That is why interesting jazz means carrying some of the power, warmth, and intensity of jazz into our lives.

There is a direct and sometimes demonstrable connection between different kinds, forms, and styles of jazz on one hand and the periods and spaces of time of their creation on the other hand.

The most impressive thing about jazz besides its musical value is its stylistic development.  The evolution of jazz shows the continuity, logic, unity and inner necessity which characterize all true art.  This development constitutes a whole – and those who single out one phrase and view it as either uniquely valid or as an aberration, destroy this wholeness of conception.  They distort that unity of large-scale evolution without which one can speak of fashions, but not of styles.  The styles of jazz are genuine, and reflect their own particular times in the same sense that classicism, baroque, romanticism, and impressionism reflect their respective periods in European concert music.

Almost all great jazz musicians have felt the connection between their playing styles and the times in which they live.  The untroubled joy of Dixieland corresponds to the days prior to the World War I.  The restlessness of the “roaring twenties” comes to life in Chicago style.  Swing embodies the massive standardization of life before World War II; perhaps, to quote Marshall Stearns, Swing “was the answer to the America – and very human – love of bigness.”  Bebop captures the nervous restlessness of the forties.  Cool jazz often reflects the resignation of men who live well, yet know that H-bombs are being stockpiled.  Hard bop is full of protest, soon turned into conformity by the fashion for funk and  soul music.  This protest gains an uncompromising, often angry urgency in free jazz.  Then we have the jazz of the seventies, a new phase of consolidation – not in the sense of resignation, but rather in the sense of painfully acquired wisdom, of wanting to accomplish the possible short of chaos and self-destruction.  What has been said in such a generalized and simplified way here is even more applicable to the many different styles of individual musicians and bands.

This is why so many jazz musicians have viewed attempts at reconstructing past jazz styles with scepticism.  They know that history runs counter to the nature of jazz.  Jazz stands and falls on being alive, and whatever lives, changes.  When Count Basie’s music became a world-wide success in the fifties, Lester Young, who had been one of the leading soloists of the old Basie band, was asked to participate in a recording with his old teammates for the purpose of reconstructing the Basie style of the thirties.  “I can’t do it,” Lester said.   ” I don’t play that way any more.  I play different; I live different.  This is later.  That was then.  We change, move on.”

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