petals

Glenn Miller, who wrote that piece that all jazz musicians hate to play- called “In The Mood”- but yet every wedding guest always knows to request it. I even saw an interview about Glenn Miller with some of his former band members and they were like, “Oh yeah, he pulled out ‘In The Mood’ and we thought it was just crap. We hated it. We couldn’t believe it became so popular.” Kind of a commercialism that happens to music in general that makes it more accessible to the public somehow. And this has to do with the music industry- they see this ability, this trend of watering down serious art and selling… and there’s where it goes. It’s not so much what musicians want to create that gets heard, which is sad, lamentable, for those of us who like to be creative; but really, it’s determined by what gets pushed and what sells and what people think is cool.

(Tape stops)

SW: (Repeats inquiry)

CM: Okay, so how has the American public been affected by jazz? Well, not a great deal by the music itself, I would say. But more by fashionable things that were associated with the music. The dances, of course, in the swing era were kind of like, you know, the charleston and all that with the flappers and all, very trendy and very popular… And it also, kind of, out of ragtime, came this kind of… the public saw the music as being bad news. You know, the ragtime- syncopation- was considered practically satanic by the upper class. And a lot of that has to do with where it was accepted. In New Orleans, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, people like that, were playing in the Red Light District, basically- they played for prostitutes and their clients, and that was how they made a living- that was the people who listened to the music. So it had this reputation, and middle class America, upper class America was not interested to being exposed to this sinful music. Another thing was the dancing that was associated with it. Not risqué for now, at all, just kind of cheek to cheek close dancing… people actually touched each other when they danced, and this was terribly, you know… This was way before rock and roll, people were way opposed to ragtime first, and then swing bands. But fortunately, the kind of thing that changed that was a couple of dancers- Irene and Vernon Castle. They were in a broadway show, The Sunshine Girl, and they danced the turkey trot- they had all these animal dances, the turkey trot, the fox trot- and all of a sudden it was on broadway and the people who went to the broadway were like, “Oh, that’s, that’s not bad.” And then, all of a sudden, it was kind of, at least, socially acceptable to do that. And they kind of made the equivalent of videos about how to properly do it and made it a kind of art form instead of, you know, “you just kind of get real close and squeeze a little bit”. There was that kind of… the dancing effected… It’s kind of a development in kind of the moral character of the country that “oh well maybe that’s okay”. And I’ve heard a comparison comparing popular music in America to the English language. Which was, you know, considered kind of course, but yet now, there are more things written in English than there has been