Anyone who focuses on the ragtime, jazz, and swing music of the first four decades, whether performer, listener, or both, is at some point subjected to a comment similar to this: “Oh, so you dwell in the past.” I’m not sure why the music I love to play and listen to is a target for statements like that; people enjoy Elvis, the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, hell, Britney Spears, and somehow none of their music or styles are labeled “the past.” I wonder if it’s because people who listen to music from, let’s say, the 1950s-1990s are feeling nostalgic for their youth and the soundtrack of the contemporaneous “good times” they enjoyed in their halcyon years. Indulging in nostalgia could be, one might observe, a perfect definition of “dwelling in the past,” yet it’s rarely viewed thus. Indeed, at this point in time OKOM (meaning, as should periodically be pointed out, “Our Kind Of Music:” an umbrella term for the styles listed in my first sentence) is inexorably being pushed out of the “nostalgic” category by attrition. In short time, there’ll be no one left who experienced the music of the 1930s firsthand.
I think I chose my topic this month because that offensive phrase was recently lobbed at me by a journalist doing a phone interview to write a story on my upcoming appearance in the area her publication covered. I can’t remember the name of the newsp
The Rise of a Jazz Vibraphonist: Evelyn Yosmali
Garry Berman
