1924 was a definining year for American music, as practitioners on all fronts—classical and popular, theatre, dance hall, Tin Pan Alley, and jazz (the most recently emerging “modern” craze)—increasingly found themselves at odds with each other and challenged both artistically and financially by the changing landscape of their field brought on by the onslaught of records and radio: "The Menace of Mechanical Music", as John Philip Sousa
called it. Some, like Paul Whiteman, attempted a rapprochement with his Experiment In Modern Music (wherein he premiered George Gershwin's
Rhapsody In Blue) in February and his ongoing campaign to "Make a Lady out of Jazz". Between June and September
Etude Magazine undertook a multi-issue study of "The Jazz Problem". In March a contingent from The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, successfully lobbied Congress to amend copyright law to ensure ASCAP members would be fairly
compensated when their music was performed on the radio. And in April "The Father of American Musical Theatre" Jerome Kern (back row, third from the left) actually banned the music from his currently Broadway musical
Sitting Pretty from being performed by dance orchestras and on radio at all! "It is about time", he declared, "that someone should take a stand against the maltreatment of music by the average jazz orchestra. Jazz is not a style of performing music. It is a degradation of style…"
None of our music now reaches the public as we wrote it except in the theatre. It is so distorted by jazz orchestras as to be almost unrecognizable…
The public, through the cabaret and radio broadcasting, is not getting genuine music, only a fraudulent imitation…
A composer should be able to protect his score, just as an author does his manuscripts. No author would permit pirated editions of his work in which his phraseology and punctuation were changed, thereby giving to his work a meaning entirely different from what he intended."
One can see Kern’s point: music is indeed transformed–sometimes a lot sometimes a little, sometimes for the better sometimes for the worse–as it is interpretted by performers for various purposes, in diverse contexts and through time. And certainly, at times original intent is lost in the process. But we disagree that this is necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, we (and most everyone in the industry, even Kern in the end) recognizes the living, responsive nature of music in the hands of different performers as inevitable in any healthy, vital cultural tradition…and such changes are often interesting, at times even glorious.
All of us have our favorite rendition of a song or solo, and we can get a little stuck on such (in part because, since the 1890s, we experience most music via recordings). But a great new interpretation is, we would argue, worthy of our attention and, often, our admiration.
This is what OFAM 2025 both in January and this August have been about…a more self-conscious ponderment of what we celebrate at OFAM, and at The Shedd, all the time: the wonderful variety of ways a great piece of music can be played.
With OFAM 2025 Summer, Chuck Redd and company (including guest directors Will & Peter Anderson, Shirley Andress, Lynnea Barry and Siri Vik) continue their celebration of popular and jazz musicians’ ongoing interpretations and reinterpretations of their musical source material. While continuing their look—begun at OFAM 2025 Winter—at jazz musicians’ adoption of songs from the Classic Songbook (featuring Jerome Kern, Harry Warren, Jimmy Van Heusen among others), they will also look at source material originally written as jazz (Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael, Louis Armstrong, etc.) which became jazz standards and often Songbook standards as well.
As usual there will be 8 unique concerts (most with 2 performances), the Jazz Party, talks, films, and sing alongs.
Please join us!