Daily Texan writer advocates jazz as legitimate music genre in the 1940s

Published on October 3, 2013 at 12:08 am
Last update on October 3, 2013 at 7:37 am
BY LAN LE

For many people, especially residents of the “Live Music Capital of the World,” jazz music is a familiar, and often welcomed, sound. On the streets of downtown Austin, one is sure to hear the smooth notes coming from a jazz band playing in a club or a street musician’s saxophone.

But in the 1940s, Austinites might have been surprised to hear those notes coming from anywhere at all.

The origin of jazz dates from the early 1910s, but it was still unfamiliar and unappreciated enough in the ‘40s that it prompted former Daily Texan writer, Pvt. E. Gartly Jaco, to write a series of articles about it, titled “Jazz from Jaco.”

Though it may seem strange to have had such articles printed alongside news about World War II, perhaps it was all the more necessary to shift the attention of
students to a topic such as jazz to remind them of the cultural movements also taking place at the time.

In his first piece, Jaco addressed four assumptions made about jazz by those he called the “followers of the old school of music.” The assumptions included jazz was “low brow, disconnected noise,” its “original conception was formed in immoral institutions” and should be shunned, it only appealed to adolescents and, in its best form, jazz could only be understood by musicians.

The article, published Sept. 1, 1944 — exactly five years after World War II had begun — hit each of those points, with Jaco’s fervor equal to that of any jazz musician’s today.

In the case against those who called jazz “disconnected noise,” Jaco said, “Laws of psychology prove that when a person cannot understand something, he either shuns it altogether or denounces it in some manner,” a statement many non-mainstream musicians today would likely agree with.

Read more: http://www.dailytexanonline.com/news/2013/10/03/daily-texan-writer-advocates-jazz-as-legitimate-music-genre-in-the-1940s