Today, jazz is an art that can satisfy the compulsions of the liberationist and the conservative, of those who seek change and of those who prefer stasis.16
As Ingrid Monson wrote, “The art music known variously as jazz, swing, bebop, America’s classical music, and creative music has been associated first and foremost with freedom. Freedom of expression, human freedom, freedom of thought, and the freedom that results from an ongoing pursuit of racial justice.” One has only to read, for instance, historian Michael H. Kater’s Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (1992) or author Josef Skvorecky’s extraordinary novella The Bass Saxophone (1977) to know how profoundly true Monson’s observation is – that jazz was a beacon, an act, a trope of freedom, an expression against repression that inspired many people around the world. But if jazz was, at one point in its history, about freeing oneself from artificial and arbitrary constraints in both popular and classical music, about freeing society from its restrictions and repressions, then, for many of its fans and practitioners, it has now become about preserving and conserving a tradition, an ideology, a set of standards, a form of practice. Today, jazz is an art that can satisfy the compulsions of the liberationist and the conservative, of those who seek change and of those who prefer stasis.16