From Free Life No 38, July 2001

From the Sunday Times of July 1st 2001:

"Ministers are to compel 3m pupils in state schools to do voluntary work from next year as part of Tony Blair's mission to halt the drift to a "selfish and soulless" society."

Compel? Voluntary? I looked in vain through the rest of the article for signs that anyone on the Sunday Times thought that this was a strange combination of concepts. Only the name of the writer, Geraldine "Hackett", suggested that uric acid might be being extracted, perhaps from a government press release. More likely is that "voluntary" has changed its meaning, from doing stuff you choose to do, to doing particular sorts of stuff. And you can then compel people, without any sense that you might be contradicting yourself, to do that particular "voluntary" stuff. I guess I'm getting old. One of the signs of old age is that you expect words to go on meaning what they used to mean. Nevertheless, "voluntary" still has some sort of meaningful future, doesn't it?

Another sign of looming death is that you accumulate "laws", to which you attach your own name if you haven't heard others proclaim them first. Most are variants of Sod's Law, the one that states that whatever can go wrong will. Laws like: The Other Queue Always Moves Faster (Until You Switch At Which Point The One You Were In Races Ahead). Or: When you want a screwdriver, you can always find five, of the Other Kind.

One of my favourite Laws is a little more profound. It states: The quality of a twentieth century man-made object is inversely proportional to the frequency with which the word "art" was slung around during its creation. (See my Libertarian Alliance Cultural Notes No. 2, Against Arts Subsidies.)

Watching Ken Burns' excellent documentary series on BBC2 about Jazz has confirmed for me the wisdom of this law. For years Jazz confused me. I was brought up as a classical person, so I have no difficulty threading my way past the dross to the gems in the world of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, etc. But Jazz seemed to have too faces. Much of it sounded great, and the worse it was recorded the better it sounded. Full of fizz, pep, joy, and crammed with the musical virtues of tunefulness, inventiveness, and that perfect blend of the expected and the unexpected that all the best music exudes. But other bits of Jazz consisted only of interminable slabs of what can best be described as musical masturbation. This is not intended as a cheap insult; it is an insult that makes sense and is thoroughly deserved by all the wankers who produced the sort of Jazz I'm referring to, and all the other even more baffling twats who assembled to witness its production.

The Burns documentary made sense of this extreme contrast. Basically what happened was that some brilliant folks invented Jazz.

Among these folks was Louis Armstrong, whom I had previously regarded, through only having seen him on television and in movies done in his later years, as a sad old Uncle Tom type, instead of as the highly skilled and inventive artist that I now realise he was. The sight of an ex-pop genius still trying to make a living can be very misleading, not to say downright embarrassing, and one of the great services performed by Burns' show has been to reinstate people like Armstrong as the great figures they were. Burns homed in especially on "West End Blues", and I recommend that you do too, if you haven't already. I now have two cheap Armstrong Double CD collections, and very fine they are. (By the way Louis Armstrong must now, it seems, be pronounced "Lewis" Armstrong, rather as Pekin now has to be said "Bay Jing". What's that about? More old age symptoms I fear.)

And then, some time around 1940 the crap crept in. Jazz had by then mutated into "Swing" and was earning a well deserved living for itself and was winning World War II and then the peace that followed it. This was the "big band" era. But then, alongside this, big banders would assemble in drug infested hell-holes during the hours after their professional duties had been done, and they would play amongst themselves, for their own amusement. The results are about as interesting to listen to as would be the recorded meanderings of actors talking drunkenly amongst themselves as they too come down, in the small hours of their mornings, after their various curtain calls, from their performance-induced adrenaline highs. Occasionally inspired. Mostly just dull, dull, dull. As the great caravan of pop moved away from Jazz, to "crooners" and by-and-by to rock and roll, the sound of Jazz became dominated by these after hours heroin-sodden ramblings. And, to excuse the vacuity and aural-navel-gazing nature of what they were now doing, and to soften the blow that their skills were no longer in such commercial demand, the musicians involved called it "art".

Thanks to Burns, I now know that what I like isn't Jazz, as such. It's Swing. That's the bit I like. The bit that made money. The bit that Gave The People What They Wanted.