To the editors:
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Salim Muwakkil’s “Pop: I’m Bad, Therefore I Am” [January 22] reveals a confused and contradictory attitude towards jazz. On the one hand, in describing the musical tastes of the “black bourgeoisie,” he notes that “jazz has become an exclusively aural art form; dancing is not allowed. (Jazz began as dance music. But to satisfy Western canons of art–canons that exclude dance music, except waltzes, from the category of serious music–jazzmen seeking respect ignored the feet.)”
It’s really too early to pronounce on any possible contribution to music of this latest mass pop-music fad. But for Muwakkil to accuse those of us, black and white, who love jazz as having somehow betrayed jazz by listening to Davis’s Kind of Blue in the peace and privacy of our homes or applauding the Kronos Quartet’s rendition of Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” in the concert hall is simply wrongheaded.
