Jazz


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Jazz is not Rachmaninoff, yet some aspects of it, in my opinion, may fulfill the criteria for music according to Ayn Rand's views.

Most jazz comes from 20th century "tiddly-wink music" (show tunes), improvised upon and developed by skilled musicians, conveying a "benevolent universe" sense of life. There are, however, left-wing political jazz, and anti-conceptual chaotic jazz.

I am not aware of anything Ayn Rand wrote about jazz, but if she did, I would like to read about it. She did, I know, advocate tap-dancing, which is a dance form emanating from the jazz tradition.

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Jazz is not Rachmaninoff, yet some aspects of it, in my opinion, may fulfill the criteria for music according to Ayn Rand's views.

Most jazz comes from 20th century "tiddly-wink music" (show tunes), improvised upon and developed by skilled musicians, conveying a "benevolent universe" sense of life. There are, however, left-wing political jazz, and anti-conceptual chaotic jazz.

I am not aware of anything Ayn Rand wrote about jazz, but if she did, I would like to read about it. She did, I know, advocate tap-dancing, which is a dance form emanating from the jazz tradition.

Rand was dismissive, but not apparently familiar enough with the genre to have said anything significant. I am not sure where you get the notion that tap comes from Jazz. It is much older. I'd simply watch Ken Burns and form my own opinions. Rand's aesthetic concepts are tools, not rules.

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You seem to be saying that you like jazz. I'm glad you've found music you like, and I hope it has brought you boundless enjoyment and will continue to do so.

Jazz gets a passing mention in We the Living as an example of the life Kira longs for in the west. I don't get the impression that the author especially liked it herself. Why do you need a rationalization? Can you imagine Roark hearing a piece of music and liking it and then sniffing around for permission to say so?

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Rand wrote, in her foreword to the revised 1959 edition of We the Living (first published in 1936), that "We the Living is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write. […] The specific events of Kira's life were not mine; her ideas, her convictions, her values were and are" (xviii-xix). Early in the novel, Kira and Leo, her lover, make their first, abortive try at escaping the newly minted and already disastrously failing Soviet Union. To keep up each other's spirits as they prepare to stow away aboard an outbound ship, they remind each other of what they will find if only they have the courage to stay the course and discover a way over to the other side.

Leo whispered: "Over there. . .there are automobiles. . .and boulevards. . .and lights . . . ."

An old man stood in a doorway, snow gathering in the brim of his frayed hat, his head hanging down on his breast, asleep over a tray of home-made cookies.

Kira whispered: ". . .lipstick and silk stockings. . . ."

A stray dog sniffed at a barrel of refuse under the dark window of a co-operative.

Leo whispered: ". . .champagne. . .radios. . .jazz bands." (100)

Yet, according to Barbara Branden, it would be a mistake to infer from this passage that Rand herself was fond of jazz. "No, not especially," Branden told an interviewer in 1992, when asked, "Did Ayn Rand like jazz?" On the other hand, Branden continued, jazz had a kind of symbolic significance for Rand, and it was this – the "larger meaning" of jazz – that led her to use it as she did in We the Living. According to Branden, Rand "said once […] that what she would love more than anything is not ever to have to think about politics, because it wouldn't be necessary. She loved what she saw as the frivolous in America, that this was a country where you didn't have to be concerned whether you were going to starve to death before tomorrow, or freeze to death, or to be put in prison, or sent to Siberia. You could be concerned with things like lipstick and silk stockings." And jazz. "So […] even if she didn't care for jazz specifically, [it] was symbolic to her of everything that Russia didn't have and that America did." (See http://www.barbarabr...interview4.html ) If anything, Branden may have understated the case when she said that Rand didn't "especially" like jazz. In May 1936, only a few weeks after the first publication of We the Living, Rand wrote to the radio announcer "Ev Suffens" (air name of Raymond Nelson), who had solicited input from his listeners as to the future of his late night program Midnight Jamboree, that "[a]s to the music, my vote is: more classics, particularly light concert classics such as you have been playing lately. Personally, I would say: all classics, but I don't mind suffering through a jazz number once in a while if it's necessary and if your audience demands it" (Letters 30) .

JR

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Good grief folks!

Who the hell cares if Ayn liked jazz or herbal tea!

Make your own mind up. Jazz is wonderful. It is not easy to understand at times because of the improvisational aspects of the art form, but it is rich, passionate and deeply emotional.

I will never understand this desire to find out what Ayn liked in the arts.

Adam

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Good grief folks!

Who the hell cares if Ayn liked jazz or herbal tea!

Make your own mind up. Jazz is wonderful. It is not easy to understand at times because of the improvisational aspects of the art form, but it is rich, passionate and deeply emotional.

I will never understand this desire to find out what Ayn liked in the arts.

Adam

I care.

--Brant

humanitarian

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Good grief folks!

Who the hell cares if Ayn liked jazz or herbal tea!

Make your own mind up. Jazz is wonderful. It is not easy to understand at times because of the improvisational aspects of the art form, but it is rich, passionate and deeply emotional.

I will never understand this desire to find out what Ayn liked in the arts.

Adam

Yes, of course. How silly of me. The only reason people could possibly have for being curious about Ayn Rand's taste in the arts is a determination not to make up their own minds about the arts - a determination to slavishly follow Ayn Rand's lead wherever it might take them. There could be no other way to account for anyone's feeling any curiosity whatever in regard to this issue. What we need around here are free-thinking, independent-minded individuals who are ready to make their own decisions about the arts and are ready also to support the Republican Party politicians who will lead us back to a free society.

JR

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What we need around here are free-thinking, independent-minded individuals who are ready to make their own decisions about the arts and are ready also to support the Republican Party politicians who will lead us back to a free society.

Classic. The reason readers keep coming back to Objectionist Living. This is the sort of non-sequitur that money just can't buy.

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Obviously if anyone respects Ayn Rand as one hell of a novelist one would likely be interested in her other tastes in the arts.

--Brant

Brant:

I can understand desiring to discover Ayn's tastes in the arts, but I do not understand that if she did not express an opinion on jazz, or if she did, why an individual cannot make up their own mind about it.

This is not a slight on her in any way and if it came across that way, it was unintentional. Irritable over the Giants being eliminated from the playoffs. Banal though that is.

Adam

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Rand wrote, in her foreword to the revised 1959 edition of We the Living (first published in 1936), that "We the Living is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write. […] The specific events of Kira's life were not mine; her ideas, her convictions, her values were and are" (xviii-xix). Early in the novel, Kira and Leo, her lover, make their first, abortive try at escaping the newly minted and already disastrously failing Soviet Union. To keep up each other's spirits as they prepare to stow away aboard an outbound ship, they remind each other of what they will find if only they have the courage to stay the course and discover a way over to the other side.

Leo whispered: "Over there. . .there are automobiles. . .and boulevards. . .and lights . . . ."

An old man stood in a doorway, snow gathering in the brim of his frayed hat, his head hanging down on his breast, asleep over a tray of home-made cookies.

Kira whispered: ". . .lipstick and silk stockings. . . ."

A stray dog sniffed at a barrel of refuse under the dark window of a co-operative.

Leo whispered: ". . .champagne. . .radios. . .jazz bands." (100)

Yet, according to Barbara Branden, it would be a mistake to infer from this passage that Rand herself was fond of jazz. "No, not especially," Branden told an interviewer in 1992, when asked, "Did Ayn Rand like jazz?" On the other hand, Branden continued, jazz had a kind of symbolic significance for Rand, and it was this – the "larger meaning" of jazz – that led her to use it as she did in We the Living. According to Branden, Rand "said once […] that what she would love more than anything is not ever to have to think about politics, because it wouldn't be necessary. She loved what she saw as the frivolous in America, that this was a country where you didn't have to be concerned whether you were going to starve to death before tomorrow, or freeze to death, or to be put in prison, or sent to Siberia. You could be concerned with things like lipstick and silk stockings." And jazz. "So […] even if she didn't care for jazz specifically, [it] was symbolic to her of everything that Russia didn't have and that America did." (See http://www.barbarabr...interview4.html ) If anything, Branden may have understated the case when she said that Rand didn't "especially" like jazz. In May 1936, only a few weeks after the first publication of We the Living, Rand wrote to the radio announcer "Ev Suffens" (air name of Raymond Nelson), who had solicited input from his listeners as to the future of his late night program Midnight Jamboree, that "[a]s to the music, my vote is: more classics, particularly light concert classics such as you have been playing lately. Personally, I would say: all classics, but I don't mind suffering through a jazz number once in a while if it's necessary and if your audience demands it" (Letters 30) .

JR

Impressive answer JR. Is your mind a virtual index or what? I mean, I've read those things too, but I'd never have remembered enough detail to readily answer the above question.

Shayne

-Wondering how to plug JR's mind into Google

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Obviously if anyone respects Ayn Rand as one hell of a novelist one would likely be interested in her other tastes in the arts.

--Brant

Brant:

I can understand desiring to discover Ayn's tastes in the arts, but I do not understand that if she did not express an opinion on jazz, or if she did, why an individual cannot make up their own mind about it.

This is not a slight on her in any way and if it came across that way, it was unintentional. Irritable over the Giants being eliminated from the playoffs. Banal though that is.

Adam

Well, why can't they? What's incompatible?

--Brant

curiosity leads you on

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What we need around here are free-thinking, independent-minded individuals who are ready to make their own decisions about the arts and are ready also to support the Republican Party politicians who will lead us back to a free society.

Classic. The reason readers keep coming back to Objectionist Living. This is the sort of non-sequitur that money just can't buy.

A freebie!!

--Brant

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Most jazz comes from 20th century "tiddly-wink music" (show tunes), improvised upon and developed by skilled musicians, conveying a "benevolent universe" sense of life. There are, however, left-wing political jazz, and anti-conceptual chaotic jazz.

Ugh. Some good in there.

To quote Frank Zappa: "Music is BIG." And within music, jazz is huge. Studying jazz is a scholarly art, if you want it to be--you can spend a lifetime learning about jazz; there is no end to it. It might be useful to read a book or two about jazz history. And yes, things like the Ken Burns. There are myriad resources, and it is an extremely enriching journey. Jazz began, in a way, as a uniquely American music art, but of course its origins trace back prior to that. You can start looking at the early fusion between African rhythms, slave songs, what have you, with European music traditions. To know jazz, it is very good to learn a great deal about blues. It goes every which way. Principle to jazz is improvisation, of course. Oh, I could go on forever and ever.

There was a wonderful presentation this weekend on Medici TV of the Ebene Quartet. These are principally classical musicians, but they are so lovely at the jazz. Here is a blurb they did before their first NY performance.

Here they are with saxophonist Stacey Kent performing Jobim's "Corcovado." I am just sharing this because it is simply fabulous.

When you find your tastes in jazz, it is an exquisite experience. As to political or philosophical issues, yes, jazz musicians have very often used their art as a platform to make statements. But I really think, especially when you first start out, it is much more important to learn the various dialects, rhythms, traditions, and cultivate the ability to get the emotional content, be able to isolate parts in your ears, and so on.

Jazz has been one of the most beautiful gifts I have ever found in life.

rde

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Although I listened to jazz since high school, I recently rediscovered it as "emotional fuel." I was thinking about 1959, the year I graduated from high school, when friends introduced me to some of the musical technicalities of the art form. (Yes, it's art.) Reminiscing a few months ago, I started researching jazz on the Internet, and found that it was a major year in jazz history, with the emergence of West Coast "cool" jazz.

There are two more pertinent facts: During the pre-election and post-election period of 2010 I began to become very demoralized listening to radio debates (conservative rants, mostly) and I would switch to the jazz station which rapidly recharged my so-called benevolent universe sense of life. I stlll listen to conservative rants, but I can't take them in the higher doses I used to enjoy, and jazz is always a welcome alternative.

The third fact is this: a few days ago I re-read "Art and Cognition" in The Romantic Manifesto. I was appalled. I will summarize my reaction by saying there was some baby and a lot of bath water. No glue in any work of art? Not even the rabbit-skin glue used by the Old Masters to prep their canvases? Photography is not a tool for making art? Anything not photo-realistic and created with brushes and paint, can't be called art? And no whim! Not even a little eensy-weensy smidgen of whim, so you'd hardly notice?

I've mentioned in other posts that I like Picasso. I have good reasons for liking Picasso, and I will write about that some other time.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Obviously if anyone respects Ayn Rand as one hell of a novelist one would likely be interested in her other tastes in the arts.

--Brant

What if you don't respect her as a novelist? One hell of or not, what then? Rand is a novelist only in the same way that Uri Geller is metallurgist.

But if Rand hated jazz then I'm in total agreement with her...it's...evil. 8 blokes on stage each playing a different tune. I like music with boundaries, jazz spirals. But as the man said "Kimmler, there are no rules."

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I subsequently got a slightly more specific private message from Kimmler.

According to him, the top jazz musicians were John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Sun Ra—and all three were awful, by his lights.

Since jazz emerged around the time that Sun Ra arrived on the planet (he was born in 1914), leaving room for many other styles that might appeal to those not enamored of trends from 1955 through 1970 or later, it wasn't much of an answer.

Maybe Kimmler should move over to SOLOP, where Lindsay Perigo would be inclined to endorse his manner of music criticism.

Robert Campbell

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I subsequently got a slightly more specific private message from Kimmler.

According to him, the top jazz musicians were John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Sun Ra—and all three were awful, by his lights.

Since jazz emerged around the time that Sun Ra arrived on the planet (he was born in 1914), leaving room for many other styles that might appeal to those not enamored of trends from 1955 through 1970 or later, it wasn't much of an answer.

Maybe Kimmler should move over to SOLOP, where Lindsay Perigo would be inclined to endorse his manner of music criticism.

Robert Campbell

Here was me thinking that private messages are just that...we still on for that date today darling? Should I PM you the details...there is no pressure but don't bring the Miles Davis CD's...puts me off my stroke. Know what I mean?

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Rand wrote, in her foreword to the revised 1959 edition of We the Living (first published in 1936), that "We the Living is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write. […] The specific events of Kira's life were not mine; her ideas, her convictions, her values were and are" (xviii-xix). Early in the novel, Kira and Leo, her lover, make their first, abortive try at escaping the newly minted and already disastrously failing Soviet Union. To keep up each other's spirits as they prepare to stow away aboard an outbound ship, they remind each other of what they will find if only they have the courage to stay the course and discover a way over to the other side.

Leo whispered: "Over there. . .there are automobiles. . .and boulevards. . .and lights . . . ."

An old man stood in a doorway, snow gathering in the brim of his frayed hat, his head hanging down on his breast, asleep over a tray of home-made cookies.

Kira whispered: ". . .lipstick and silk stockings. . . ."

A stray dog sniffed at a barrel of refuse under the dark window of a co-operative.

Leo whispered: ". . .champagne. . .radios. . .jazz bands." (100)

Yet, according to Barbara Branden, it would be a mistake to infer from this passage that Rand herself was fond of jazz. "No, not especially," Branden told an interviewer in 1992, when asked, "Did Ayn Rand like jazz?" On the other hand, Branden continued, jazz had a kind of symbolic significance for Rand, and it was this – the "larger meaning" of jazz – that led her to use it as she did in We the Living. According to Branden, Rand "said once […] that what she would love more than anything is not ever to have to think about politics, because it wouldn't be necessary. She loved what she saw as the frivolous in America, that this was a country where you didn't have to be concerned whether you were going to starve to death before tomorrow, or freeze to death, or to be put in prison, or sent to Siberia. You could be concerned with things like lipstick and silk stockings." And jazz. "So […] even if she didn't care for jazz specifically, [it] was symbolic to her of everything that Russia didn't have and that America did." (See http://www.barbarabr...interview4.html ) If anything, Branden may have understated the case when she said that Rand didn't "especially" like jazz. In May 1936, only a few weeks after the first publication of We the Living, Rand wrote to the radio announcer "Ev Suffens" (air name of Raymond Nelson), who had solicited input from his listeners as to the future of his late night program Midnight Jamboree, that "[a]s to the music, my vote is: more classics, particularly light concert classics such as you have been playing lately. Personally, I would say: all classics, but I don't mind suffering through a jazz number once in a while if it's necessary and if your audience demands it" (Letters 30) .

JR

JR: thanks for posting this. Very cool compilation.

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Kimmler,

You didn't say anything in your private message that you couldn't have posted on this thread.

Besides, I was blocked from replying to your private message.

Robert Campbell

That seems to be his modus operandi, pointless though it surely is.

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