532 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
people were studying jazz formally.
Today many—perhaps even most—
professional jazz musicians have
some amount of formal jazz training.
Moreover, in a move unprecedented
for any music in the popular sphere,
musicians and institutions devoted
to jazz now are eligible for grants
from government agencies and pri-
vate foundations. The idea of grants
for jazz musicians is a symptom of the
music’s position in the twenty-fi rst
century: recognized as artistically
important but largely overlooked by
the audience for popular music.
Schools have not been the only institutions to embrace jazz. The Smithsonian
Institution set up a jazz program in 1970. Important record reissues followed, and
so did Smithsonian-sponsored concerts by ensembles reconstructing jazz perfor-
mances of the past. Those concerts gave birth to the jazz repertory movement:
a trend since the 1980s to view jazz as a music with a history that has produced,
chiefl y in the form of phonograph recordings, a body of masterpieces worth pre-
serving. In the latter particular, if not in its unwritten sources, it resembles the
European classical repertory. An infl uential 1986 article by pianist and educator
Billy Taylor titled “Jazz: America’s Classical Music” marked a defi ning moment in
jazz’s passage through folk, popular, and classical spheres. By the standards used
to measure value in classical music, jazz now fi tted that description.
One of the premier jazz repertory ensembles is the Jazz at Lincoln Center
Orchestra. Organized in 1987, the group presents historically minded concerts
that are the centerpiece of a jazz program at New York’s Lincoln Center for the
Performing Arts, the home of the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan
Opera, the Juilliard School, and other organizations associated with the classical
sphere. In the 1990s the jazz program was formally instituted as Jazz at Lincoln
Center, and in 2004 it moved into a newly designed performing arts complex
containing three performance spaces, an education center, and a museum-like
hall of fame.
Jazz at Lincoln Center’s director since its inception has been Wynton Marsa-
lis, perhaps the best-know n fi gure in jazz today. A native of New Orleans, Marsa-
lis, born in 1961, shares Taylor’s view that jazz is not only an African American
inheritance but also a broader refl ection of American character. Backed by
a pedigree that includes professional training at the Juilliard School and per-
formances of many classical works, Marsalis has presented himself as an art-
ist working within the jazz tradition’s strict standards—that is, the evolutionary
stream beginning with ragtime and blues and followed by such styles as New
Orleans, Chicago, New York (the dance orchestras of Duke Ellington and Fletcher
Henderson), Kansas City swing, bebop, and more recent spin-offs from the
straight-ahead mainstream grounded in the rhythmic innovations of the 1940s
and 1950s and in the ethos and tonal framework of the blues.
Marsalis won two Grammy awards in 1983, one for best classical solo perfor-
mance and one for best jazz solo performance, and repeated that achievement
the next year. In 1997 the Pulitzer Prize in music composition was awarded forDr. Billy Taylor on Jazz as a Classical Music
J
azz is America’s classical music. It is both a way of
spontaneously composing music and a repertoire, which has
resulted from the musical language developed by improvising
artists. Though it is often fun to play, jazz is very serious music.
As an important musical language, it has developed steadily from
a single expression of the consciousness of black people into a
national music that expresses American ideals and attitudes to
Americans and to people from other cultures all around the world.In their own words
the jazz repertory
movementWynton Marsalis172028_22_531-558_r3_sd.indd 532 23/01/13 11:20 AM