It’s Trad, Dad I think I am the only person in my circle of friends who likes trad jazz. The others, especially the musicians and those with a serious interest in music, tend to think of it as corny, cheesy, perhaps over-simplified in terms of melodies. George Orwell once wrote an essay on Kipling in which he coined the phrase ‘good bad poetry’. He did not give a clear definition, but the examples he gave, including much of Kipling’s work, Dowson’s Cynara (from which we were bequeathed the phrase ‘gone with the wind’), and the Charge of the Light Brigade, give you an idea of what he meant. Sentimentality, obvious themes, an element of superficiality and a turn of phrase with which the reader can identify are the attributes which his examples seem to have in common. He described a good bad poem as ‘a graceful monument to the obvious’. And something similar could be said of trad jazz. Catchy, stick-in-your-ear melodies, lacking in subtlety, but nevertheless sometimes evoking ...
