The Serious Business of Levity

On April 9, my wife Sue and I were delighted to attend a performance by Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks in Upper Nyack, New York. The concert was in benefit of The Rockland Conservatory of Music, now celebrating its sixtieth anniversary. Vince and the band were magnificent and swung hard. The venue, The Reform Temple of Rockland, was intimate—but it wasn't packed. At least five subscribers to The Syncopated Times were in attendance, which made us smile. But there were empty seats, and Sue and I both noted what is all-too typical at jazz concerts: the average age of the audience easily surpassed that of the musicians on the bandstand. Happily, that isn't the case with dance events. The Lindy Hop community is out in force when there's the prospect of a hardwood floor. But we do wonder why concerts featuring the finest jazz players in the country aren't teeming with young music students. (To be fair, we noticed the same dearth of young people at a performance—also magnificent—of Schubert's Great C Major Symphony at Colgate University the following day.) I'll focus here on early jazz. “Most of it is just too happy and upbeat to be taken seriously,” wrote Monk Rowe, who is the Joe Williams Director of the Hamilton College Jazz Archive. “Too much entertainment value attached to an art form means a lower rung on the value ladder. Too often the presentation works agains