Early this year a group of U.S. longhair composers, including Ulysses Kaye, a nephew of King Oliver, visited Russia as part of a cultural exchange deal.
This, fall, a group of five Russian composers, headed by Dmitri Shostakovich and including Dmitri Kabalevsky, Tikhon Khrennikov, Konstantin Dankevich and Firket Amirov, visited the United States.
They were flown around the country, and included in their itinerary a three-day visit to the San Francisco area.
At their San Francisco press conference, the Russians were asked what they thought of jazz. It was obvious from their answers that they knew nothing of it (despite the fact that Kaye and his companions reported they were constantly asked about jazz by Soviet composers when they were in Russia). Jazz, to the visiting Russians, seemed to mean nothing more than hotel dance music.
