Jazz (on the) rocks

AS a producer of jazz concerts, I read with piqued interest Paul de Barros’ piece [“Mayday for the Music Too,” Nov. 6] regarding the state of jazz and the mass media’s tepid relation to it. I admit to wincing when TV scenes portray jazz artists and jazz advocates as social misfits. Having worked closely with literally hundreds of jazz musicians and the clientele that supports their performances, I can state confidently that the men and women who have chosen to pursue the art of jazz as players or listeners are some of the most articulate, intelligent, creative and engaging people that you will meet in any setting.

PAUL LINES

Pasadena

Lines is the founder of the Pasadena Jazz Institute.

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WHY is jazz a dying music? Because the music has changed.

I became a jazz fan when I was dragged by friends to the Hollywood Palladium one night in 1942 or ’43 and heard Gene Krupa’s big band with Anita O’Day and Roy Eldridge. I said, “How long has this been going on?!” It was wonderful!

My personal love affair with jazz reached its climax in the early 1950s with the marvelous Woody Herman bands -- the First Herd a few years earlier and finally the Third Herd. After that ...

What I find now is just about no living jazz musicians I want to listen to. I repeatedly listen to our Bay Area jazz station and never hear a living jazz musician I want to hear again.

I think it began to die with John Coltrane. Any number of times I have tuned into the middle of a jazz piece and heard a tenor sax playing things that I don’t understand and that don’t swing. They don’t swing! And then I find that it was Coltrane. Where did the idea come from that you have to understand jazz to appreciate it? If it ain’t got that swing, it don’t mean a thing!

I don’t see how jazz can survive except as a kind of museum piece in New Orleans, with music that Basie and Duke and Coleman Hawkins and even Louis left behind long ago.

What a pity.

DON ENGEL

Rohnert Park