4ZB TALENT QUEST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 337, 7 December 1945, Page 5

4ZB TALENT QUEST

Sir,-After reading your commentator’s comment on the 4ZB Children’s Talent Quest, I feel I must contradict everything he or she has to say concerning the items performed. I. have heard every item of this delightful highstandard juvenile competition and fail to see where the commentator gets the idea that there were a lot of jazz items among the fifty-eight entries. I am under the impression that he or she could not. have heard this competition at all, because out of the fifty-eight items in the

12 to 16 class, only two could be classed as popular music in the true sense of the word which most people wrongly call jazz. One was a boy of 13 playing a piano accordeon and the music he played was straight out melody with no frillings. He could not be expected to play Beethoven, Mozart, or Chopin because if that had been the type of music that he could obtain then he would not have troubled to learn the instrument, or his father would not have bought him such an expensive instrument. I would like your commentator to give his or her interpretation of the word jazz as applied to music. As a musician who has played every kind of music from Wagner, Rimsky Korsakov, Tchaikovski, Stravinsky, , down to Irving Berlin, I say that no APRA PAILS ICL PAP VA PAP SAPS

music played or sung becomes jazz when the performer takes a piece of music, popular or classical, and extemporises with frillings so that the melody becomes almost obliterated or the time is altered to give it a rhythntic beat; in other words when the player makes a jazz pattern out of a simple piece of compo-

sition.

MUSICIAN WITH 53 YEARS'

EXPERIENCE

(Dunedin),

(For space reasons we have had to omit our correspondent'$ catalogue of items _~Ed.)