the piano player used to be, his
cigarette turning the ivories of the
upper register a sickly Mars yel–
low. He was not often a good
pianist, but he knew more tunes
than the twenty the juke box
knows; and you could talk to him.
Compared with the music cur–
rently being written, musical per–
formance is deceptively healthy.
Even the best jazz today lacks the
fresh originating intelligence at
work in the late twenties; and the
best musicians are now only ex–
tending and developing patterns
of improvisation laid out during
the early quarter of this century.
There is an immense concern with
mere preservation. The unearth–
ing, several years ago, of Bunk
Johnson, probably the oldest living
pioneer of jazz, who had dropped
out of music and had to be pro–
vided with a set of new teeth be–
fore his triumphant comeback, was
a welcome act of antiquarian re–
covery. Johnson's long-buried and
pure turn-of-the-century New Or–
leans style served as a landmark
from which to view almost fifty
years of jazz mutations and var–
iants. Johnson's more impassioned
admirers correctly placed great em–
phasis on his astonishing power
and wide-open tone, alive with per–
sonal feeling. These almost com–
pensated for an inventive defi–
ciency that made for considerable
monotony as chorus followed
chorus.
It has been the practice of
618
some later musiCians to work in–
tensively at the inventive, though
feeling has often been buried in
displays of virtuosity. Performers
such as Armstrong, James P. John–
son, Kid Ory, Barney Bigard, Art
Tatum, Earl Hines, Bechet, Jack
Teagarden, Georg Brunis, Ben
Webster, and a good many of the
Chicago stylists clustered around
Eddie Condon, continue to resist
corruption; but their ranks are
systematically being thinned out by
desertions for cushier swing bands,
by sudden collapses of talent, and
the normal high death rate among
jazz musicians, whose occupational
hazards include heart attacks, mal–
nutrition, and a recurrent pattern
of drunkenness and sudden death of
pneumonia in Middle Western
cities.
More than a few go on playing
well; the difficulties of hearing
them continue to multiply. Man–
hattan's Fifty-Second Street, once
as devoted to night clubs featuring
jazz and jam sessions as Grand
Street is to wedding gowns or
Bleecker Street to salami, makes
way for replacements in the form
of office buildings, expensive clubs,
business establishments, and tour–
ist night spots with "intimate"
singers and Hawaiian dancing
girls. Four years ago there was at
least one night club in New York
that offered first-rate jazz, un–
watered and nonpoisonous liquor
at reasonable prices, and a quiet
crowd that did not come there to
have their photographs taken, their
