‘All You Need is Love’

Press, 24 June 1978, Page 13

‘All You Need is Love’

POINTS OF VIEWING

By FELICITY PRICE While being impressed with the serious, thoroughly researched, documentary approach to the development of modern popular music — an approach long overdue — I admit to being a little bored so far with the monumental 17-part “All You Need is Love” series. The series is almost onequarter way through now and it has only just reached the jazz era. The documentary has bitten off a gigantic mouthful and as it chews up and spits out the various episodes for us to watch, we can only expect to see a cameo of the great musicians and fleeting, mostly superficial insights into the widely varying eras, rhythms and musical styles that have combined to produce today’s music. Jazz — with its unresolved diminished sevenths and maddening rhythms that skip beats and leave your toes tapping in mid-air in total confusion — was a minority interest in the history of modern music but an important one. Thursday night’s fourth episode of the series on TVI showed up an interesting, hitherto played-down side-light of the development of jazz — the racism that was involved. We were shown how jazz was nearly forced out of existence through a gigantic, racist put-down by white people who could not appreciate the music or its creators. We saw jazz groups improvising, racing off at melodic tangents yet staying within the over-all group sound. And we saw the subtle transition from the ghettos to the respectable, middleclass white suburbs, when jazz finally came out of the black closet and was recognised all over the world. “Musically, jazz is more European than African,” said Dave Brubeck casually, brushing away years of struggle and evolvement. Chick Corea, the modern black jazzman, neatly rounded it all off, saying that jazz, like any dying musical form, had become a museum piece. But because jazz was so significant, anything that followed would have to be a hybrid in one way or another.