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Not for Whisky Drinkers? Jazz now sticks almost entirely to LPs, which give jazzmen a permanent and handy record of what they are doing—and the chance to develop an extended musical idea on a single side. On the other hand, there have been too many mediocre jazz LPs (upwards of 300 new jazz disks each year) on which the sheer yawning playing space led instrumentalists into the dreariest kind of repetition.
While jazz records are selling better than ever, new music rooms close as fast as they open. In cities like Atlanta, Dallas, Kansas City, there is almost no audience for live jazz. The trouble, thinks Critic Nat Hentoff, is that the nightclub is not the place for jazz, certainly not the low-keyed, modern variety. Says one player: "Let's take jazz away from the whisky drinkers." More and more jazz fans seem to prefer taking their jazz—and their whisky—sitting in front of their hi-fi sets.
The center of the live product is New York, headquarters of the Modern Jazz Quartet, best and most imaginative of the "chamber jazz" groups, and of Trumpeter Miles Davis, most talented of the postbop generation of blowers. New York jazzmen are forever plunging into love affairs between jazz and classical music. Some of these experiments are stimulating, some dreary, but all point to a challenge. Until now, U.S. music has been most creative in the gold and blue, hot and cool wails of jazz. Has the U.S. developed a formal musical voice other than that of jazz and of pop tunes? In the midst of the music boom, what of the serious American composer?
Shameful Labor. For one thing, the U.S. composer has never been so highly regarded by the public. Lowell Mason, the early 19th century's leading U.S. musician, recalled that he kept his name off a musical tome because "I was then a bank officer in Savannah and did not wish to be known as a musical man." A century later, Composer Charles Ives gave one reason why he had decided to go into the insurance business and write music on the side: "As a boy I was partially ashamed of music . . . Most boys in the country towns of America, I think, felt the same way." The young composer today works under no such hazard: boys as well as bank directors respect him.
The U.S. artist longs for the freedom of living in a garret. But like his fellow citizens, he wants his garret air-conditioned and his rent paid. U.S. composers justly complain that 1) only a few of them can make a living from their music, and 2) all of those belong to a generation that has already had its chance. They include Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Norman Dello Joio, William Schuman and Gian Carlo Menotti in the list.
The economic facts are indeed tough. The U.S. composer must himself pay the costs of having a score and orchestral parts copied (about $1,000 for a symphony). In Europe, publishers bear the cost of copying. All the composer is likely to get in royalties from a performance is between $25 and $50.