The first of many articles about jazz to appear in The Atlantic Monthly. Though Engel's cultural biases are dated, his appraisal of jazz as a serious contribution to American music takes a progressive stance, and shows the excitement the new music generated. The contrapuntal complexity of jazz is something native, born out of the complex, strident present-day American life.
Jazz is abandon, is whimsicality in music.
A good jazz band should never play, and actually never does play, the same piece twice in the same manner. Each player must be a clever musician, an originator as well as an interpreter, a wheel that turns hither and thither on its own axis without disturbing the clockwork. In 1921, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, both Italian-Americans, were convicted of robbery and murder. Felix Frankfurter, then a professor at Harvard Law School, was considered to be the most prominent and respectable critic of the trial. He was appointed to the Supreme Court by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939.