So to come to the jazz “mystique.” Does the hipster with his green beret, black glasses, and embouchure whisker, the band rat with her Theda Bara makeup and dirty feet in Jesus sandals, the amateur dope fiends with their adulterated marijuana, the Beat Generation, do these people represent “jazz as a way of life”? God forbid! Marx said of Bakunin that he suffered from furor aristocraticus. The hipster is the furious square. The Beat novelists and poets and their camp followers are debauched Puritans. They agree with the most hostile critics of jazz, or for that matter with the most chauvinistic slanderers of the American Negro. They just like it that way. In their utter ignorance they embrace the false image which their enemies the squares have painted.

As Charles Mingus once said to me, “We didn’t evolve the new forms of modern jazz in dirty cellars full of dope peddlers. We worked it out in people’s homes, which we didn’t call ‘pads’ either. And our families stood around and listened and approved.”