Of Bears and Penguins

If it ain't baroque, it must be...
Bach's a jazzer. Yeah. Curly wig aside, he's a jazzer. (Not to mention the fact that Bach delivered the equal temperment tuning of music that we still use today)
I'm at my piano today just reading through a Bach prelude and there's this beautiful chord progression, D7, pedal D, leading to G7, still over pedal D, GMaj7, back to G7, and it's amazing.
Here's Bach, coming shortly after the church (yep, the Catholic one) stopped telling composers what they could or couldn't write. And he's just playing with harmonies willy-nilly.
When you take in the fact that quite a lot of Baroque music was originally improvisatory...well it blows your mind.
A bunch of white guys, composing primarily for the church or wealthy patrons, soloing over chord progressions that don't really get used all that much until you hit the brothels of late 19th Century New Orleans.
Yeah. Curly wig aside, Bach's a jazzer.

And speaking of brothels
Jazz, one of the few art forms that American's may claim as truly their own, is now played in the finest concert halls in the nation. The music is supported by national endowments, and is taught in several school music programs.
Over the summer I heard the Count Basie Big Band play in the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas. The band was dressed in tuxedo's and the audience was full of blue-haired ladies dressed to the nines.
And to think that 80 years ago Count Basie was playing in a seedy bar on 18th street in Kansas City.
Louis Armstrong learned to play in the red-light district of New Orleans, was addicted to laxatives and marijuana.
Miles Davis was from East St. Louis, oh yeah, he had a couple of nasty addictions to, but he kicked them eventually.
Basie's predecessor, Benny Moten, disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
The term "jazz" itself has numerous connotations, overtones, and innuendos.
This music whose history is littered with prostitutes, drugs, bad blood, street fights, poverty, and discrimination is played in the most gorgeous music halls in all the world.
And it makes me chuckle. That this music, with so many skeltons in the closet, is held up as the art form that it's creators always intended for it to be. That little blue-haired old ladies, with carefully coiffed bouffants, and finely manicured fingernails, sit quietly in plushly upholstered seats attending to the voices of those artists on stage who owe their craft to all night jam sessions in greasy joints on the wrong side of the tracks.