Frank Kofsky

Mark me words, Janis Joplin is fated to be the next American pop superstar.

If, that is, Janis and her fellow members of Big Brother and the Holding Company decide that stardom is their goal. Right now, they are properly ambivalent about that trip, because they are mindful of the way in which pop fame and fortune can erode the soul. Fearful of losing their own, they teeter on the brink.

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Editor’s note: Frank Kofsky’s byline was inadvertently left off his piece, “End of Jazz Clubs?” in the last issue. Joseph Jarman, whose picture ran with the article, is a young altoist from Chicago.

It always comes as a distinct pleasure to be able to recommend an outstanding jazz recording. Particularly so with the new music, since, as we shall see, the obstacles in the way of artistic creation for the men of this persuasion are especially severe. Because of these obstacles, the new music, when finally it does get set down on record, is often not presented as advantageously as it might be.

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In effect, rock has become the white man’s jazz. Bob Dylan, had he been born black, would surely have found a place somewhere in the jazz revolution; and a white Archie Shepp (the mind boggles!) would feel quite at home in a rock group like the Mothers of Invention (who have, by the way, a composition dedicated to Archie in their book). Not that the two musics are actually merging.

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Talk to almost any parent with “teen aged” children and you can hear the same litany endlessly chanted: rock is tasteless (American society being so notable for its good taste!), rock is loud, the only thing that counts is the beat, why can’t they listen to good music (meaning Montovani), and more, always more, of that.

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Why the critics?

That is a question I get asked fairly frequently, by friends and correspondents who want to know why I expend so much energy on this particular aspect of the jazz Establishment.

The answer is really quite simple. My point of departure is to analyze what services the jazz critic might be performing for the music (which means for the musicians and their audience). I then compare this with the actual accomplishments of the critics. Since the balance thus struck is so wholly unfavorable to the major critical figures—Leonard Feather, Martin Williams, Dan Morgenstern, Michael Zwerin and the entire editorial staff of DOWN BEAT—I conclude that it is my duty to the jazz community to expose (a good 1930s leftist word) their failings, to prevent them from leading their readers even further astray.

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When Cecil Taylor spoke at a panel discussion at the University of Pittsburgh prior to his concert there, it apparently came as a shock to his collegiate audience that he and his fellow musicians no longer wish to undergo the demoralizing experience of presenting their music in nightclubs. How could the musicians not want to play in nightclubs? the students wanted to know. What was going to happen to jazz then?

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A few weeks ago the New Yorker’s man in jazz, Whitney Balliett, went out to the Coast to catch the Monterey Festival. While he was there he spoke with some of the “workers’ aristocracy” of jazz, the white musicians who make their living primarily from studio gigs.

Like all aristocracies, this one has worked out a complete ideology which “justifies”—in its own collective mind, at least its privileged class position. Thus Balliett:

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The men who play the new styles in jazz frequently tell me that they don’t like to call their music that—they see nothing desirable in having their art identified with the gin mills, criminal activities, hustling, and ruthless entrepreneurship and exploitation that characterize the jazz scene today. (Or for that matter, yesterday. Haven’t black artists always been forced to create in these circumstances?)

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