The sum of these developments is a music as eloquent and influential as any created in the last century.
The sum of these developments is a music as eloquent and influential as any created in the last century. We are long past the point at which one had to be American-born to become an influence on jazz development, as illustrated by the careers of Japanese pianist/composer Toshiko Akiyoshi, Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek, South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, British saxophonist Evan Parker, Canadian pianist Oscar Peterson, and Austrian keyboardist/composer Joe Zawinul, among many others. At the same time, jazz has left its mark on both other styles of music (classical, country, pop, rhythm & blues, rock) and other art forms (cinema, dance, fiction, painting, photography, poetry), not to mention vernacular speech. Once assailed as noisy, discordant, and an assault on moral values, jazz is now taught in high schools and colleges, where it is played by hundreds of thousands of young musicians and studied by a growing rank of scholars. The Smithsonian Institution, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and other major cultural institutions have established important and influential jazz programs, and the National Endowment for the Arts has honored more than one hundred musicians with the coveted title of NEA Jazz Master and a monetary award. Once disparaged and shunned, jazz is now central to America’s cultural heritage.