'He Calls It Progress

Seldom in all its 57 years had Carnegie Hall been so jammed--and never so racked by such raucous music. The 200 fans on stage had the most tranquil spot: they were behind the brass. But out in front, the louder it got, the better they liked it. And no band yet had outblown Stan Kenton's for sheer din per man.

It wasn't swing: toothy Stan Kenton had already pronounced that "dead, gone, finished." Some doubted that it was even jazz: it had a shifty beat (and sometimes none), little--if any--form, and even less improvisation. Most of it sounded like Duke Ellington with the D.T.s. But when Kenton's band got to pushing out such huge, screeching blotches of sound as Artistry Jumps and Message to Harlem, the fans ripped the place wide open. They listened to his newest and most pretentious masterpiece;, Prologue Suite in Four Movements, in a state of glassy somnam-bulance. When Kenton capped it all with his Concerto to End All Concertos, Carnegie hadn't heard such yelling in years.

This week Kenton moved into Chicago's Civic Opera House for a one-night stand; the 4,200 seats and standing room had been sold out for two weeks, and 3,000 ticket-buyers had been turned away. (It was no trouble at all to get seats in advance for the Metropolitan Opera's famed Ezio Pinza that afternoon.)

Band of the Year. Not since the first golden days of Glenn Miller and Harry James had a band's popularity reached the proportions of a craze. What was all the shouting about?

Kenton is a 6 ft. 4 1/2 in. Californian who at 36 has the same ambition Paul Whiteman had in the '20s: to marry classical music and jazz. In Whiteman's case, what emerged was pseudo-symphonic--a blend of Tin Pan Alley and Tchaikovsky. In Kenton's, it is a driving, nervous (and technically skillful) wedding of swing and Schonberg. Kenton started his outfit in 1941, got ahead fast by getting up early to sign autographs, and looking up disc jockeys whenever he hit a new town. For the past two years, his musicians have been voted Band of the Year.

Stan Kenton considers his "progressive jazz" just what the psychiatrist ordered. Last month, he sat down with a Down Beat reporter (Harvardman Mike Levin), gave him a 62-column interview that sounded sometimes like a seminar in psychology, sometimes like a talk with Father Divine. Said Kenton: ". . . The human race today may be going through . . . nervous frustration and thwarted emotional development which traditional music is entirely incapable of not only satisfying, but representing."

"Emotional Projection." Last fall, he decided to dispense his music only from concert halls (it is undanceable anyway). Long-haired competition is the least of his worries. Said Kenton: "Jazz will dominate and swallow up classical [music] as we know it in this country. . . . Stravinsky, Milhaud, Prokofiev and Hindemith . . . use some of the same sounds and rhythmical devices, but we still are the only ones to rely on the emotional projection of the freely individual musician." But of one notoriously freely individual musician, he says: "What's wrong with Louis [Armstrong] is that he plays without any scientific element ... all natural forms of inspiration in music--have been exhausted --today we have to create music scientifically and then project with it and into it emotion."

That kind of thing was too much even for some of the initiates. Stormed Barry Ulanov, who is an editor of a rival cultist magazine called Metronome: "Kids [are going] haywire . . . over the sheer noise of this band. . . . There is a danger ... of an entire generation growing up with the idea that jazz and the atom bomb are essentially the same natural phenomenon."

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