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An Art Gone Astrayby Gene Lees NOT SO VERY LONG AGO, anyone who went to a world's fair or some similar exposition was likely to see models of transportation of the future. They were wonders of bustling efficiency: tiny cars and trucks and buses and airplanes and boats hastening through tiny landscapes in the clean and adroit discharge of their mechanical duties. Today we are cursed with clogged highways and the eye-smarting, lung searing effluents of the realization of that horrendously clumsy system so cheerfully foreseen by myopic visionaries. To drive south from New York City through the stink of the New Jersey flats and view the hideous panorama of transport near Newark air port is to see that ancient expectation fulfilled, but the dream has turned into a nightmare. The years since World War II have been an epoch of change so rapid and constant as to be dizzying. Our expectations, once aspirant and-as it seems from our present perspective-naively optimistic, have been honored chiefly in their disappointment. We expected the world to become continually better, politically freer, and socially safer and more equitable under the benign rule of an educated populace capable of more intelligent decisions about its own political, economic, social, and aesthetic evolution. Instead, the young men coming home from the war found that a generation of somewhat older men, driven by an insecurity created by the soul-withering ordeal of the Depression, had taken effective control of the country's economic machinery and, by extension, of its political life. As a now-prominent attorney put it, "By the time we got back, it was too late." The price we have paid, and are still paying, for the damage done to men's psyches by the Depression very nearly became the death of democracy in America. Indeed, it remains to be seen whether it can yet be restored to the health it enjoyed in the time before the computer tracking of almost everyone's life and the government's assumption that criminal activity was its moral right. Chico O'Farrill, the brilliant Cuba born composer, became known in the U.S. for his writing for Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Kenton, and Benny Good man. Little of his symphonic music has been accessible in North America, though I have heard tapes of it made by the Havana and Mexico City symphony orchestras. O'Farrill's jazz alone, however, assures his position as a musician of stature. Like so many others of foreign birth, he has a far more acute appreciation of the valuable elements in the norte-americano culture than most native Americans. When he was first writing for American orchestras, there seemed to be every reason to expect this country's musical culture to continue to transcend and exceed itself. But by the 1960s, O'Farrill was reduced to making a living (albeit a good one) for his family by composing television commercials and the background "pads" for rock record dates and the surprisingly large, though ghettoized, "Latin" music market. During the Sixties, it was my custom to spend most Saturday evenings at O'Farrill's home. I would arrive about six or seven o'clock, and Chico would heave his weekly sigh of relief from the horrors of creating the highest-quality trash of which he was capable, for cynical admen and illiterate record producers who would pro claim him brilliant for the absolute minimum of his talent. He would break out the Scotch, then the Berg or Stravinsky or Debussy records, chuckle, and say, "All right, now let's listen to the real music." And for a few hours we would retreat into that firmament where music is art, not industrial artifacts. On one such evening, Chico summed it all up in four words: "I am so disappointed." The confession was so simple and heartfelt, and so perfectly expressed the malaise of so many fine musicians in the U.S., then and now, that I have never forgotten the moment. There are among us many musicians who function in several genres and don’t divide and subdivide mu sic into categories. For men such as O'Farrill there are, in the aphorism variously attributed to Debussy, Richard Strauss, and Duke Ellington, only two kinds of music: good and bad. There is a lot of bad jazz, but generally jazz has provided much of the best expression of our culture. Though one encounters on occasion excellent country and western music, the mean of the genre is as banal, garish, and trashy as a neon-outlined roadhouse. (John Hartford's recording of his own "Gentle on My Mind" is one of the fine moments in popular music. Jerry Reed's early recordings, such as "Roving Gambler," "In the Pines," and "Georgia on My Mind," are superb, but since attaining wide popularity he has let his work sink back to the mawkish level of most Nashville music.) Those with a true contemplative love of music are usually quick to appreciate excellence, no matter what the textbook label affixed to it. Thus the problem of American music is not one of categories or hierarchies. Nor is it a matter of a person's age. I constantly encounter musicians in their early twenties, or even their teens, whose proficiency on their instruments surpasses that of artists of thirty years ago, just as 18-foot pole vaulters make Cornelius Warmerdam's headline-making 15-foot jump into a footnote of history. And these young people have an odd wistful yearning for an era before their birth. Sitting at the piano, or trumpet in hand, reading through fake books, they discover in the harmonic rich ness of popular music in the Forties, Thirties, and even Twenties a modernism in poignant contrast to the mu sic in the current period of-to use Clare Fischer's apt phrase-"harmonic retrogression." No, it’s not a generation gap; it’s a cultural gap. For there is a general feeling among the musically educated that we have failed our artistic des tiny in this country, that our bright promise has gone astray and perhaps will never be fulfilled. How did we come to this cultural disappointment? Many complex factors have acted within and upon our music to bring us to this condition, factors I propose to examine in the months ahead. ++++++++ (High Fidelity, Feb 1977) Also see: |
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