more than likely that they will introduce change to the music as well as to the dance styles, and many of us (and I, being a moldy fig, will probably be among them) may not take readily to such evolution. (This phenomenon is hardly new, of course. By all accounts Buddy Bolden was a trailblazer, and the ODJB did not play music to which the ragtime aficionado was accustomed. Louis Armstrong also changed the course of jazz, as did Duke Ellington, and so on.)
I am not quite sure what the young people of today are—or will be—doing with it. There are several such bands scattered around the country that I have not heard as well as some that I have, and with luck others will form. Some of us have heard what the Dirty Dozen, the Rebirth Marching Band, and the Squirrel Nut Zippers have done over the past few years with traditional New Orleans jazz, and I must confess it is not exactly my cup of tea.
But for those of us who do not cotton to these new approaches, possibly there will continue to be bands that try to reproduce, without being mere copyists, the kind of music they have heard on recordings or at jazz events. A band of young women (two unique characteristics in a jazz band today) from Canada who call themselves “The Mighty Aphrodite,” while not a “legacy” or “tribute” band, do not seem to have radically changed their interpretation of one style of traditional jazz from that which we are used to hearing. Probably others will be attracted to other styles. And it might be quite instructive to find out from established bands of young people what it was that attracted them to the music in the first place, how they came to form a band, etc. I don’t recall ever reading any interviews where such questions were posed and answered.
So I am not at all sure that traditional jazz will become extinct, but it is something of an endangered species these days. Possibly things can be turned around by our putting into practice some of what I have suggested here—and I’m quite sure that other people can propose even more and different solutions. But if attracting the young to traditional jazz is simply—even benignly—neglected, as it largely is at the moment, the music may indeed disappear with the last of us, at least for a few generations until someone will rediscover it, as has happened in the past. Then there just might be another revival.
But why leave that to chance?
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