From the Scrapbook

©Tom Myott

I've quoted these lines in my notebook, but I can't remember from whom. It sounds like Martin Williams, one of my favorite jazz writers, but I'm not sure. Whoever he is, he sounds true:

"Jazz is the music of a people who have been told by their circumstances that they are unworthy. And in jazz, these people discover their own worthiness. They discover it in terms that mankind has not experienced before. I have deliberately borrowed a theological term in saying "unworthy." I think it is an apt one because the experience of feeling unworthy is fundamental to the twentieth-century man who, whether he admits it or not, is in danger of losing his old gods or has lost them already. But the music involves discovery of one's worthiness from within. And it is thus an experience that men of many races and many circumstances have responded to. Perhaps through jazz, then, the gods, in some small way, prepare for their metamorphosis."

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