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Our secular saints
James Moody will celebrate his 82nd birthday with a performance at B.B. King’s Blues Club and Grill on March 26th. All proceeds from the event will go to the James Moody Scholarship Endowment Fund.
Jazz musicians, like hippies, represent a sensibility continually replenished but whose founding — one is tempted to say “actual” — membership is well into its winter years. The new ones are not quite the same — they practice the same craft, but are tempered and diverse, seemingly dilute. The old guard in jazz, most particularly the bebop set, have attained the social status of generals in popular wars — some keep their posts, gray-haired and decorated, and continue to lead smokeless drills in Greenwich Village; others have retired, and spend their time sitting on symposia and contributing to public works. Their pronouncements are hollow, wearied, conservative. Occasionally they are drawn in by organizers of bloodless reenactments, but their lives are quiet and distinguished.
They remain in the public imagination hung with their medals and remembered by their involvements — in Miles Davis’s section or Dizzy Gillespie’s troupe (those statued leaders, however fiery their tempers, disruptive various parts of their career, are still bathed in an unmoderated reverence wholly reserved from public figures felt more closely by their constituency). They are publicly remembered for having participated at whichever turning point, whichever Bunker Hill session. And no one but the most brazen grognard bickers about which leader was the most effective, and there are very few gossipers interested in unearthing whatever inconvenient facts may live on overseas, the less savory expatriate performances. All were on the same side, most survived, and returned silently to civilian life. They are rosy and comforting figures, unrewarded but vaguely appreciated by their country, with a generalized, dim, uncomprehending gratitude. They are shaded with quiet, mostly unpolitical nobility. Far from being thought of as entertainers, as the impulsive and polarizing face of a fashion, they are an unrecognized, anonymous, anointed caste. A disappearing corps of minor municipal saints.