JAZZ IN NEW ZEALAND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 892, 7 September 1956, Page 5

JAZZ IN NEW ZEALAND

Sir-Mr. L. D. Austin is a prejudiced humbug if he fails to recognise that both our Broadcasting Service and The Listener cater more for him and a handful of musical snobs than for the general listener. The long-haired minority have four YC stations grinding out glutinous gloom continuously, thus ensuring that there is no real alternative programme to the YA’s chatter and the ZB’s detergent drama. Your well-meant but often unreliable "Highlights" feature graphically illustrates this. Unless it can be shown that jazz is harmful, and not merely distasteful to some, the Minister of Broadcasting is in no conflict with his portfolio of Education if he satisfies an obvious demand for this type of entertainment. There is already a tendency for the Broadcasting Service to improve our minds rather than entertain. Light music and variety would top a preference poll today, the same as it did twenty years ago, and a return to the staggered block diakram which followed that vote is long overdue. The publicity recently given to jazz in The New Zealand Listener should be welcomed, for you have long been ashamed to feature light music in any detail. Recitals of opera and the hackneyed classical deadbeats are shown in full on the programme pages, but excellent local light entertainment such as Three’s Company, the Gil Dech Orchestra, and the John McKenzie Quartet are not "nice’ enough to. have the _ individual items mentioned. Recently I ‘stayed at home to listen to Three’s Company from 2YA, only to find that it was a repeated recording of a programme broadcast from 4YA_ two months before. And why should the items in "Morning Concert" be given in detail any more than those of "Music While You Work"?-only because you have been intimidated by the noisy few. Since the last word has been pronounced on jazz by our Hutt Valley otacle, I shall do the same for classical music. "Good" music consists of a series of groups of tones synthesized under

rigid mechanical rules by musicians who were ignoramuses compared with the veriest amateur of today. We can hear more excellently performed classical. music in a week than Mozart, Bach, Beethoven and the rest heard in all their lifetimes. Conventional music has been composed by electronic’ machines, but I doubt if any mechanical brain could predict the next decade’s development in jazz, for the latter is the living musical entertainment of the people, in contrast to the dead dogma of a closed-shop union of tinkle-tinkle witch-doctors, The silly logic of these charlatans is seen at work each Easter, when dance music of the 18th and 19th centuries is fitting entertainment fot Good Friday, while the 20th centurv’s folk idiom is bevond

the pale.

VARIAN

J. WILSON

(Christchurch).

Sir,-It is a relief to find L. D. Austin (Listener, August 17) expressing in such strong terms what so many people are feeling about the deterioration in musical standards over the air in New Zealand. When the Service first started the NZBS had a unique opportunity to influence and raise the level of public taste by presenting good wholesome entertainment, musical and otherwise. Instead, it has fostered and encouraged the desire for cheap, sentimental rubbish and listeners have been apt pupils. The serials are as bad, if not worse, with the accent on murder and crime. The policy, too, now seems to be to turn all stations into hybrids: good and bad all jumbled up together-an unholy alliance, perpetually pleasing some and exasperating others in see-saw fashion, all the time. Of course, The Listener reflects this downward tendency and gives the impression of a rather cheap jazz-sports weekly. The English Listener, on the other hand, is always dignified and never offends against good taste. I would suggest that if we turned from the hybrid principle to exactly the opposite, and rigidly separated stations according to different levels of taste for all types of programme, then some degree of peace and contentment might be achieved for everybody.

D. M.

MIRAMS

(Timaru).