A letter from an admirer of the Institute reads as follows: ..."why is the Tristano school always shown as a branch of cool jazz? Those guys were hardcore bebop heads. Is it just that they were white and some of them wore glasses so people confuse them with Brubeck?" A seemingly offhand, almost rhetorical question, which we here at the Institute took seriously and which led us to discover an enormous new field of research.

Our chief researcher Bud Sativa's first attempt to disentangle this enigma by analyzing shifting hair patterns proved to be a dead end. Now, six months later, Professor Owen Indica has devised a truly scientific means of classifying jazz musicians in his or her* proper school, be it Traditional, Swing, West Coast, Bop, Cool, Hard Bop. Post-Bop, New Thing, Avant-Garde, etc. We call it: Spectacle Assessment Typology (SAT).

*Please note the gender limitations of this process. Until the 1960's, female jazz musicians seem not to have been allowed to wear eyeglasses in photographs.

Very few examples of eyeglass wearers in early jazz could be found by our research staff: James Reese Europe, Miff Mole, Charles "Doc" Cooke, Fudd Livingston and Frank Teschemacher. Questions arise: Were photograph-ees in general warned to take off their glasses to avoid reflections from the flash powder? Was wearing glasses considered "namby-pamby" enough that jazz players of that era felt compelled to take their glasses off? Is good eyesight part of a genetic constellation that also includes genes dominant for improvisation and the ingestion of bathtub gin? No clear answer emerges. In any case, white or black, as the above photos show, there was remarkable consistency in the style of the eyeglasses, thus simplifying the Spectacle Assessment Typology of early jazzmen (Primus Jazzus Sapien).

Assessing the next generation, we still see very few eyeglass "users." However, those who did were among the most well-known band leaders. Trombonists