CRITIC OF AMERICAN JAZZ

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 31, 29 April 1927, Page 9

CRITIC OF AMERICAN JAZZ

ERNEST NEWMAN’S VIEWS Ernest Newman, England’s eminent music critic, recently renewed his attack on jazz in a review of a book on the subject by H. O. Osgood. “Our American friends,” he wrote, “are laudably anxious to have music of their own like other nations. Jazz being the one form of music that is indisputably American, it is natural that Americans should feel for it the admiring affection of a young mother for her very own first baby, regardless of the doubts cast by detached outsiders upon its looks.” Newman falls afoul of Osgood s defence of a jazz composer’s simplification, reports the New York “Times,” and says:— , . “If it be seriously contended that it is necessary thus to mutilate and deface the tunes of great masters in order to introduce them to the masses I can only reply that if there is any man on earth who needs to approach Chopin at his simplest through the intelligence of Mr. Carrol his proper place is not in a concert-room, but in a home for feeble-minded. “Would Mr. Osgood carry his own argument to its logical conclusion and contend that Velasquez and Raphael and Corot should be made acceptable to modern morons by having their Pictures put out of the drawing, the grouping changed, and the coloui's falsified?”