By Dan Morgenstern, Director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at
Rutgers University Professor Gerald Early On the appeal of jazz
to European immigrants (Audio Excerpt from JAZZ A Film by Ken
Burns) Jazz is the most democratic of music, holding the
individual and the collective in delicate balance. Small wonder,
then, that it appealed from the start to many of those who had
come to America in search of freedom and a safe harbor from
persecution and oppression, and to their offspring, who were
taught to remember the past. As no less a master than Thelonious
Monk a man of few but well chosen words once put it: "Jazz and
freedom go hand in hand." From that perspective, it makes sense
to remind ourselves that what we routinely refer to as "white"
musicians are, more often than not, hyphenated Americans,
descendants from a panoply of "minorities." Though the concept
of America as a melting pot seems to have gone out of academic
fashion in these days of ethnic assertiveness, it fits jazz like
a glove. Ken Burns' des