By Hendrik Hertzberg
June 25, 2012
I became a jazz lover sometime in 1957 and was a confirmed jazz snob from then until February 9, 1964, the night the Beatles went on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Both the love and the snobbery were part of what it meant to be a certain kind of “advanced” or “nonconformist” teen-ager swimming against the era’s bland, boring tide of mainstream mediocrity. The love meant listening to the records of—and, when possible, going into the city for the live performances of—certain demigods known only to the few, an esoteric pantheon headed by the likes of Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, and other musical brethren and progeny of Charlie Parker. The snobbery meant being deaf to the magic of “rock and roll” and other suspiciously popular musical impurities. It took the Beatles to open up my ears—but at the cost of preserving my consciousness of jazz in aspic.
Though I still love jazz, my knowledge of it is stuck in midcentury. When I’ve occasionally gone to hear jazz musicians of recent generations, they’ve mostly struck me as keepers of a traditional flame—talented and proficient, but not so much creators as curators. The “modern” jazz I listen to at home tends to be nearly as old as I am.
I realize that this is a reflection of my own stuck-in-the-mudness. I mention it to explain (even if it can’t excuse) a mortifying fact: until last week I had no idea that there is such a person as Jason Moran.