Triumph of the Underdog

“The rhetoric surrounding jazz is changing. The notion that jazz is the music of the underdog’s liberation, that it is intrinsically radical is not to be found in most serious discussions about jazz today. The best jazz playing today has made room for the notion that this music makes its own meaning without the superimposition of any political or intellectual one, that it will advance by slow degrees, and that it will go around and around in further understanding and refinement of itself, eating its own tail. Structural newness, genre newness, is not necessarily what we are looking for; what we want is the musician’s individual expression: honoring the past while being yourself.”

Ben Ratliff in his recent book, “Coltrane: the Story of a Sound.”