Those who recognized the complexity and beauty of jazz early on—such as twentieth century French critic Hugues Panassi��—rightly characterized it as American's unacknowledged classical music. Their sentiment came to fruition in the wrong way by the end of the century when the genre had fallen from its peak to its current lowly status, tied for last with European classical music in terms of popularity.

This downward plunge has been blamed on everything from Elvis Presley and the coming of rock 'n roll in the 1950s, to The Beatles and the other advancing troops of what came to be known as "The British Invasion" in the 1960s, to the federal "cabaret tax" imposed during World War II that forced nightclubs to ban dancing in order to avoid the levy, turning jazz from a music that got people out of their seats and onto their feet into an introspective art form. Whatever the cause, extinct species don't come back to life except in science fiction, so one is compelled to ask, �� la Vladimir Lenin, what is to be done? Other sectors of the economy follow the principle that the customer is always right, so one possible road to recovery for jazz musicians to follow is to interpret music that is already popular, rather than limiting themselves to self-penned compositions.



Back in the fifties and sixties many jazz musicians kept the cash flowing by recording albums of songs from Broadway musicals.