The next decade will be the most experimental, most in jazz history," predicted Nat Hentoff, co-editor Jazz Review. In a speech which marked the beginnings four-day Quincy-Holmes Arts Festival, Hentoff was taking its place as a true art form and disappear "quasi-folk music."

the history of jazz from its ragtime origins, he what he termed "the increasing self-consciousness of " during the past forty years.

of the recent results of this self-awareness has been in modern jazz from "good time drinking and " to "true art music, in the sense that players and regard it as an end in itself."

the younger men in the field, there is no turning back as background for drinking," Hentoff said.

named Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Charles Mingus, Coltrane as some of the "bolder experimenter" in jazz form.

noted that the newer men were better trained than classical musicians, since they can read as well as a musicians, and can improvise as well. "I am constantly at how little a concert musician can do with his ," he said.

the increased formal training the young men have, Hentoff observed that "it is no longer possible to play by ear." He did not feel that a jazzman studying music would necessarily ruin him for jazz.

"One danger in formal training for a jazz musician is that he will become rigidly bound by it, and be afraid to try things. But this is not inevitable. Most men pick and choose from what they have learned formally."

One of the most interesting aspects of the jazzman's self-consciousness, Hentoff stated, was that apparently "the bulk of jazz repertoire is not going to be variations and improvisations of Jerome Kern or George Gershwin, but rather an indigenous set of jazz compositions."

Outlet: For Hostilities

These works, he said, reflect a kind of "Pan-Afro-American Nationalism," and are providing an outlet for the tensions and hostilities felt by the musicians. The protest content of the music, he felt, was bound to increase.

"I'm glad this in finally bursting out, I would rather it were out than festering. It will be a healthy thing for jazz."

Hentoff called most jazz critics "amateurish" and "incompetent." "It's an easy cop-out for a jazzman to say a critic doesn't know what's he doing, because he's right."

For relaxation, said Hentoff, "I listen to chamber music at home."