Anyone who has spent time and money learning about jazz soon finds that even his best friends can't stand the music he has grown to love. They present to him a solid bulwark of misunderstanding that resists all his efforts to explain, much less convert. Generally this opposition resolves itself into two kinds. One kind says jazz is corny, out of date; you can't dance to it. The other kind says it's transient; you have to think to produce "great" music. The one has been blinded by tastes in popular music; the other has been blinded by tastes in classical.

You can't answer both at once. You can't convert both with the same argument. Aim your argument at the classicist and the popular-addict will accuse you of being high-brow. Aim your argument at the popular-addict and the classicist says, "You still haven't convinced me." Soooo, you go over into a corner and mull and mull. Then someone asks you what you're doing, and you tell him you want to find out a way to convert people to liking jazz. Invariably, he'll say "Why?"

Why? You've asked yourself that before, and the answer isn't far away. You, who have chased jazz through dives you would never ordinarily looked at twice, who have chased jazz through dingy little second stores and haggled over the price of a beat-up Louie Hot Five, who have chased jazz from record store to record store after a cutout Goodman Trio, you have your experience to answer you.

To you, jazz is a manifestation of human spirit, an art form like poetry or painting. Something that reaches beyond physical limitations and unites souls and minds. A trumpet solo of Frankie Newton tells you what he's like inside. He extracts a bit of himself and holds it out for you to examine. After hearing Frankie for years, you may meet him personally for the first time. Maybe he's like his music, maybe he's not. But there's always a part of him which you know and treasure, which doesn't pass between you in a handshake or in conversation.

Those who haven't let their minds be dulled by overexposure to culture will realize, moreover, that training isn't necessary, though it helps. Good jazz, the best jazz, is only too often like the Sacco-Vanzetti letters. They are not masterpieces of grammar, but of literature, slices of life that echo endlessly in the channels of your conscious and subconscious.

Should tastes and modes of expression change, perhaps the letters will lose their force, perhaps jazz will lose its force. After the war there's no telling. But for the short period that jazz will have run its course, and the even shorter period that you have known it, jazz will have been its own justification for being. In spite of misunderstanding and ignorance, you will still have a rich experience to remember, for which you will envy no man and pity many for not having.