Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR NEW JAZZ SOUND I enjoyed reading Albert Goldman's "The Apple at its Core" (NL, May 13), and found it to be an objective analysis of the malaise in which jazz now finds itself....
...Some of the coterie are still around: Mingus, Charles, La Porta, Overton, Macero, Shuller, etc...
...The real question concerns the light in which the leading writers of each epoch chose to see themselves and their civilizations...
...Recent events, though, have persuaded me that the new manner is developing despite the failure of some of its leading exponents to follow up and develop their initial and highly successful experiments...
...MISSIONARY CRITICISM Stanley Edgar Hyman's study of the inconsistencies, partis pris and special pleadings in Cleanth Brook's criticism ("Missionary Criticism," NL, July 8) carries a good deal of force, but I think he shirks what has become the main question of criticism on the scale that Brooks attempts...
...R. W. Flint...
...PACEM IN TERRIS In contrast to Reinhold Neibuhr ("How Liberal is the New Pope?, NL, July 22), I have a slightly different interpretation of Pacem in Terris...
...But this is merely a matter of opinion...
...Hence the ease with which one detaches prejudice in Frost from the rest...
...I feel that Goldman's article might have included artists who have explored this musical genre and have developed a following...
...The "new" poetry of the present era is a sort of Methodist or Quaker revolt that chooses to ignore history...
...What I did have in mind was the so-called "Abstract" jazz of Omette Coleman, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Jimmy GiufFre and Cecil Taylor, which is, as I see it, an original and sophisticated development of the authentic jazz spirit, standing in somewhat the same relation to Be-bop and the jazz of the '50s as did Be-bop to the conventional jazz of the late '30s and early '40s...
...Short-range initiatives, such as the test-ban treaty, would be decided both on immediate power realities and long-term ideals...
...Hyman quotes Yeats's lines to the effect that "Odour of blood when Christ was slain/ Made all Platonic tolerance vain/ And vain all Doric discipline...
...It has had to evolve from its tradition...
...Hasn't all art been a "dialectic" emerging with just enough variation to make it revolutionary...
...George Russell, in my opinion, is still working out of Duke Ellington, so that we may still be able to have our apple and eat it...
...Could he mean electronic jazz...
...Who more chaste and charitable than many of the great anti-Christians, who more emotionally self-indulgent than many of the great Christians...
...Since this Abstract jazz is still only a tendency, a groping toward new light, I did not allude to it by name lest the impression be created that it was a fully realized style...
...Nat Hentoff, a propagandist for this movement, saw this eventuality as far back as 1954...
...What are the "Christian virtues" and what the "pagan virtues," indeed...
...It would not surprise me if Pacem were, over the years, to open a third way, and to suggest really viable roads to peace...
...But an accurate estimate of poetry cannot bog down—as it does in both Brooks and Hyman—in arguments about the degree of allegiance of poets to one or another organized body of thought and image...
...This group was not as avant-garde as the "Third Stream" but stressed composition...
...I doubt that Pope John's attitude was one of naive optimism...
...However, there may be some germinating seeds in the "core" which will bear fruit...
...Brooklyn, N. Y. John L. Doria Albert Goldman replies: In evoking the idea of a new jazz independent of tradition and art-music, I was not thinking of Third Stream, which is neither new nor independent but rather a bad old compromise between jazz and art-music (its roots are in the Gershwin-Milhaud '20s), satisfactory neither as one thing nor the other...
...Well, we all know that this is not strictly true, as we know that the Roman empire and Greek history were full of the odor of blood...
...In my opinion the "Third Stream" may be the new sound jazz will eventually take...
...Niebuhr is always interesting, even when one disagrees with him...
...Cambridge, Mass...
...John F. Cronin 5.5...
...One of Frost's immense advantages was that he thoroughly knew the history—a pretty thin one at best—of what he chose to write about...
...Washington, DC...
...To my mind, it appears more like an attempt to spell out completely the religious and natural-law ideals of international society, so that the picture can be seen in its totality and judged The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...In Goldman's last paragraph he suggests that the next development must be a new concept, "independent of tradition and art music...
...namely, the divorce between history and literature, between what we know to be true about the past and the claims that literary enthusiasts would like to make for sundry powerful mytho-poetic versions of the past...
...In a sophisticated way, Yeats was the same and turned Irish puritanism successfully against itself...
...on that basis...
...I shall report on Abstract jazz in the near future...
...The divorce of history from poetry, however, is more disastrous in criticism than it is in poetry itself...
...Its practitioners are puritan intellectual totalitarians, which doesn't mean that they may not produce some distinguished poetry...
...In the field of composition I would cite George Russell, Gunthur Shuller, John Benson Brooks and the pianist, Cecil Taylor...
...I refer to those musicians who worked at the "Music in the Making Series" conducted by the late David Brokeman...
...There is another school of jazz that was quite active a number of years ago but seems to have lost the public's interest...
Vol. 46 • August 1963 • No. 16
