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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2023
This text is a written version of a talk I’ve delivered on at least ten occasions in various forms and venues since 1974 when I first presented it to my graduate class on twelve-tone music at Yale University. While I reveal some of my experiences and knowledge of modern and free jazz in the talk, here I will recount a few more personal experiences that greatly affected my appreciation of jazz as a young man.
As a teenager in the late 1950s, I took piano lessons in New York City in both Steinway Hall and Carnegie Hall. I would travel from Yonkers to Manhattan every week and before and after lessons spend time visiting music and record stores and attending concerts. One of my friends was interested in jazz and introduced me to the music of various jazz artists such as Gerry Mulligan, Bob Brookmeyer, Thelonious Monk, and Ornette Coleman. Coleman was completely controversial at the time, played a plastic saxophone, and was considered to be a genius by Gunther Schuller, the then-young composer, conductor, and jazz scholar. When I heard Coleman’s first album, The Shape of Jazz to Come, and his now-classic composition Lonely Woman I was astounded and saw how his music was akin to the progressive contemporary music of Varèse and others I was getting to know at the time.
When I went to the Eastman School to study composition, I found that most of the other freshman composers were jazz players and of such high quality that they were able to pay for their tuition by taking “society gigs” in town and playing at resorts in the Catskills in the summer. Nevertheless, jazz was not yet an established program of study at Eastman, and my friends had to learn what they could on their own. They founded a jazz band, but it was only permitted to rehearse on Saturday afternoon, with warnings from the brass department that playing jazz could ruin one’s lip for playing orchestral music. The only other outlet for playing real jazz—opposed to the popular music they were paid for—was in bars and coffeehouses in town.
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