Sir, Mark Etherington suggests that children should be asking what jazz is (letter, Jan 3) and adds that there should be people in schools who can offer an answer.

In more than 50 years of listening to, and playing, music, I have yet to meet anyone who can offer a definitive answer — it’s like asking what is classical music.

My interest in jazz was awakened by the “traditional” jazz bands of the 1950s who played the Dixieland style of jazz, with trumpet, trombone, clarinet and rhythm section, as popularised by Louis Armstrong. We were naive purists who even accused Humphrey Lyttelton of selling-out when he introduced an alto saxophone to his line-up. By the 1960s my taste had evolved to cover such “cool” greats as Stan Getz, the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Miles Davis, the Modern Jazz Quartet and Gerry Mulligan, as well as the harder, more complex, styles of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane.

Then the question was easier to answer — jazz fell into two easily identifiable camps. There was traditional jazz — New Orleans, Chicago, British pop, etc (played from the heart), and modern jazz — bebop, West Coast, New York (played from the head). Today jazz crosses over with blues, rock, pop and even classical compositions. However, failing to define the genre does not diminish my pleasure when I listen to the alto sax of Paul Desmond playing with the Modern Jazz Quartet or Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue.

John Gray

Brighouse, W Yorks

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