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Article: What's wrong with being classical?(Special Jazz Issue)(jazz as the US' only classical music)
- Article from:
- The Antioch Review
- Article date:
- June 22, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Antioch Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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According to Grover Sales, he and Gene Lees got the title of their 1984 book, Jazz: America's Classical Music, from James Baldwin, who once remarked that "Jazz is America's classical music. There isn't any other." A more temperate evangelist, Dr. Billy Taylor, has been using the phrase for decades as a way to get his fellow Americans to esteem jazz in the same way that people in other countries esteem it. Probably Dr. Taylor is as responsible as anyone for keeping the phrase in circulation.
But not everyone cottons to the phrase. Jon Pareles, the New York Times's rock critic, complained recently that although "in bygone decades, conflating jazz and classical ...