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There is indeed. Jazz, which used to account for a tiny percentage of sales among the major record companies, has become a big moneymaker for the big labels. Across the U.S. there are also some two dozen companies making a comfortable profit by putting out nothing but jazz. Even such diehard highbrow companies as Westminster and Vanguard (The Bach Guild) have turned out money-making jazz albums. At Victor, which has just hired its first full-time jazz executive, a jazz-type record called Inside Souter-Finegan for six months outsold everything in the imposing Red Seal catalogue except Mario Lanza's Student Prince. Last June Dave Brubeck made his first Columbia record, Jazz Goes to College, and did even better: for four months it outsold any single album by another kind of pianist named Liberace.
The new jazz age has its echoes all over the world. In Japan, singers eagerly mimic Ella Fitzgerald while dancers gyrate in the "Fallaway Twist" and the "Natural Hover Whisk." Scandinavia has a local growth of "cool" jazz, and France has an unquenchable thirst for le jazz hot. In Britain, shops are doing brisk business in the "GENUINE 'Mr. B.' Shirt with its wide roll collar as worn by the Famous American Singing Star BILLY ECKSTINE." The Communists are paying their own kind of compliment: in the East German town of Aue last week, Red police jailed members of the "Manhattan Club" for tossing partners over their heads in "crazy boogie-woogie" dancing.
In the Jazz Age of the '20s, social critics heard the trumps of doom amid the saxophones, and Poet Hart Crane was tortured by "the phonographs of hades in the brain." The phonographs of 1954 sound far less like hades. Jazz as played by Brubeck and other modernists (Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Stan Getz, Shorty Rogers) is neither chaotic nor abandoned. It evokes neither swinging hips nor hip flasks. It goes to the head and the heart more than to the feet. Spokesmen for various jazz cliques have claimed that it doesn't swing (or swings like crazy), is cool (or hot), too intellectual (or just warmed-over bop), the end of jazz in America (or its greatest hope).
What Is "Modern"? By now, the birth and growth of jazz have become American folklore. The critics like to call it "music of protest": it started with slave chants, work songs, blues, gaudy Negro funeral parades in New Orleans−those noisy expressions of bravado in the face of death by such greats-to-be as King Oliver, Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong who blatted their way from the cemetery playing High Society or Didn't He Ramble. New Orleans jazz moved to Chicago, where a crowd of delighted white musicians pounced on it, adding a few refinements and "protested" mostly against bad gin.