 warm, warm thank you to our dedicated trustee, Denny Morse, and her husband Lester, for making possible this series and for all that you do at Cooper Hewitt, Denny. So, thank you, thank you from all of us. Tip, thank you. So, typically our Morse historic design lectures are historians and experts from the field, but tonight, inspired by the multidisciplinary and multisensory experience of our current exhibition, Jazz Age, American Style in the 1920s, where blowing changes to borrow a bit of jazz parlance. The celebrated jazz musician and composer, Victor Goins, will share his insights into the extraordinary creative output on view in the exhibition, which swoops, swings, and soars with the new wave of design that emerged in the 1920s. Over 400 objects make the galleries really pulsate with the energy and optimism of the age, set to the beat of the era's electrifying new sounds. Thanks to some fabulous partners, the Manhattan School of Music, the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, and of course, Jazz at Lincoln Center, we have a wide range of rare recordings playing in the galleries, and even impromptu performances from student musicians. This evening, we have a true jazz giant, Victor Goins, here to help us celebrate and appreciate this dynamic exhibition. Victor's expertise in the music of the 1920s is well known. His ambitious orchestral composition, Untamed Elegance, was of course inspired by the decades sounds, styles, and culture. At his very first visit to Cooper Hewitt, Victor was hooked. And we are delighted that Victor has become a friend, returning many, many times to further explore Cooper Hewitt and the Jazz Age. I often ask people who speak at Cooper Hewitt what they collect, and when I asked that question to Victor, he said, Caroline, instruments. He has over 50 instruments in his home, so I imagine that it's not a small New York City apartment. If I even tried to enumerate all of Victor's accomplishments, I'm afraid that we would lose the valuable time we have with him tonight. But allow me to share just some of the many, many highlights of Victor's illustrious career. A native of New Orleans, Victor first picked up the clarinet at age eight. A saxophonist, clarinetist, composer, and educator, Victor has been a member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the Wynton Marsalis subtet since 1993, touring throughout the world and recording over 70 releases. He also leads his own quartet and quintet as an acclaimed solo artist and has collaborated with a who's who of popular and jazz musicians from Bo Diddley and Bob Dylan to Dizzy Gillespie and Diane Reeves. Along with Untamed Elegance, which was commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center, Victor has composed over 100 original works and his latest album, A Dance at the Marty Grau Ball, features 10 original groins compositions. Victor's accomplishments as an educator are no less impressive. In addition to serving on several university faculties, he was the longtime artistic director and faculty member of the Juilliard Schools Jazz Studies Program. Following his tenure at Juilliard, Victor was named director of jazz studies and professor of music at Northwestern University, where in addition to his teaching duties, he regularly wows Chicago audiences with his memorable concerts. I was overjoyed when Victor accepted our invitation to deliver to tonight's lecture and as a gift to all of us, also offered to perform this evening. He even invited a few special guests to join him. Emma DeHuff on bass. Aaron Deal on piano and a special shout out and thank you to Steinway and Sons for providing the beautiful baby grand Aaron. We'll play tonight. That's not usually up here. And Marion Feldor on drum. And the three of them will join Victor on stage following the lecture. So please join me in welcoming Victor Goines to Cooper Hewitt. Thank you all very much. Good evening. Welcome to Cooper Hewitt. That opening composition, for me, actually says everything that needs to be said about the jazz age. Mood Indigo by the great Duke Ellington. I think the sound of his music actually represents it better than anyone else's. So we're here to talk about the jazz age. And it's a pleasure to be here this evening to speak about this important and emancipating period of American history. The jazz age, a term coined by the author, Scott Fitzgerald, was a period in American history following World War I and ending with the Great Depression. Many of you knew that already, I suspect. But it was also known by several other names. It was called possibly the Age of Confusion, the Guardia Spree in History, the Golden Boom, the Age of Wonderful Nonsense, the Age of Intolerance. I guess that's from a perspective point of view. The Lawless Decade and, of course, the Roaring Twenties. The jazz age was a period when America saw the best and the worst of itself. It saw economic prosperity, political change, a change in architecture and design, a shift in sexual morality, the bending and even breaking of rules, a period where the world became smaller, abstraction and reinvention, evolution to the machine age, and emancipation of youths and women. If not for all aspects of society, we were influenced by jazz music. Jazz poetry, fashion and industry were affected by this basement music, as it was called, that took the country by storm. Jazz music exacerbated the social and racial tensions in the post-war period. If a person was going to be hip during this period, they had to know how to walk to walk and talk to talk. They would have to know certain terminologies involved. They would have to know who was the big cheese. You would not want to be bumped off. I guess every lady wanted to beat the cat's meow. You have to be copacetic. It would be wise to know how far you have to travel if you were walking, if your dogs hurt. If you were a flapper, well, you know about those. What about gate crashes? Gen mills. And no one spoke about this next term better than Louis Armstrong, the hippie gibbies. Everybody knew about hooch, speakeasies. Certain people knew about struggle buggies. That was one that the young people definitely knew about. And everybody wanted to know about it. And as a word, it, and it's capitalized, it's not small. There was no ordinary word to the younger generation during the jazz age. All of the young generation wanted to have it. But all of them did not have it. That's because it was not a thing. It was a quality, a value or a feature. To have it, the fortunate possessor, must have a strange magnetism which attracted both sexes. There must also be a physical attraction, but not necessarily a physical beauty. Now at the end of World War I, Woodrow Wilson was president and the country was leaving an era of uncertainty. Under his leadership and in the name of idealism, the United States had been led through a devastating war in Europe. But in peacetime, Wilson crusaded for reform at home and had admonished the nation to take up new responsibilities in the world leadership. Unfortunately for him, the nation had grown tired of responsibilities and crusades. The abandonment of Wilson reflected a change in the nation's basic attitude. The era of world peace had not arrived as he had promised. With old values going sour, the nation was self-conscious and unsure of itself and seemed suspended somewhere between the innocence of childhood and the poise of maturity. The individual the country turned to at the start of the 1920s seemed to offer an escape from the rigors Wilson offered. But like the nation, he was something of an adolescent as well. That was Warren G. Harding. And Harding never let the problems of the office ruin his genetic good humor. It was thought that his most notable quality was the sweetness of his nature. And the fact that he was not a particular, particularly able man apparently didn't bother anyone. Harding's vital flaw as president was that he refused to face responsibility. As a result, while in office, his cronies were systematically robbing a public till. It's said that one of his friends revealed was to be involved in a graft and two others committed suicide to escape prosecution. Shaken by these betrayals, Harding died in office on August 2nd, 1923 of a heart attack. Now, despite all of his hardships, Harding's policy of governmental activity had been popular. Probably enough that when his successor Calvin Coolidge took office, he tried to carry it a step farther and to make sure he did nothing to rock the boat. Coolidge would spend two to four hours of every work day taking a nap just to make sure he didn't rock the boat. They used to call him quiet cow, and he was convinced that the formula for economic prosperity was simple. The chief business of the American people is business. If government kept his hand off the economy, business would prosper. And with the mood of the decade focused on freewheeling, a strong government seemed to be boring and unnecessary though. Business had slumped at the beginning of the decade, the economy became to boom. Now, at midnight on January 16, 1920, the United States went dry. Breweries, distilleries, and saloons were forced to close their doors. That was the day the 18th Amendment became law. It effectively established the prohibition of alcoholic beverages in the United States by declaring a production, transport, and sale of alcohol. Though not to consumption or private possession, if you managed to have a little surplus of your house, you were okay. But they found to be illegal except for, get this, medicinal, industrial, and of course, religious reasons. It also allowed those with a surplus as adminters of America's finance to have a good old time. As long as they didn't sell it, they can do whatever they wanted. This movement was led by the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The dry forces had triumphed by linking prohibition to a variety of progressive era social causes. Proponents of prohibition included many women reformers who were concerned about alcohols linked to white beating and child abuse, and industrialists such as Henry Ford, who were concerned about the impact of drinking on labor productivity. Advocates of prohibition argued that outlawing drinking would eliminate corruption, in-machine politics, and help Americanized immigrants. Little did they know that would not be the case. One of the results of prohibition was the illicit speakeasy. Speakeasy became lively venues of the Jazz Age, hosting popular music including current dance songs, novelty songs, and show tunes. Prohibition while viewed as morally wrong for our country was a great time for jazz music. Those venues required entertainment for all of that which was going on, and that entertainment that was provided was jazz. President Hoover called the 18th Amendment a great social and economic experiment, noble and motive. But for as noble as it may have been, seldom has law been more flagrantly violated. Not only did people continue to manufacture, barter, and possess alcohol, they drank more of it. Women to whom the saloon had been off limits, trooped into speakeasies, where they consumed quantities of prohibition's newest cocktail. Unsuccessfully, the brewing industry argued that taxes on liquor were paying more for the war effort than were liberty bonds. Yet even after prohibition was enacted, many ethnic Americans viewed beer and wine drinking as an integral part of their culture, not as advice. Enforcing the law proved almost impossible. Smuggling and bootlegging were widespread. Two New York agents, Izzy Einstein and Mo Smith, relied on disguises while staging their raids, once posing as a man and wife. Their efforts were halted, however, after a raid on New York City's 21 Club trapped some of the city's leading citizens. In New York, 7,000 arrests for liquor law violations resulted in only 17 convictions. Go figure that out. In 1921, the trade paper jewelers commented, prohibition bars the sale of alcohol, but only serve to increase greatly the sale of flask. And all of them fit that popular hip pocket that we have never had a real use for before. So prohibition failed primarily because it was unenforceable. By 1925, half a dozen states, including New York, passed laws banning local police from investigating violations. Prohibition had little support in the cities of the Northwest and the Midwest as well. The sale of alcohol went to gangsters, those such as Al Capone of Chicago. His Chicago organization reportedly took in $60 million in 1927 and had half the city's police on his payroll. This caused some major problems, obviously. Many companies dealing in alcohol went out of business. People openly broke the law. Prohibition also fostered corruption and contempt for law and law enforcement among large segments of the population. Public servants such as judges and police officers became corrupt because they took bribe from bootleggers. Harry Daugherty, attorney general under Warren Harding, accepted bribe from bootleggers. George Remus, a Cincinnati bootleger, had thousands salesmen on his payroll, many of them police officers. He estimated that half his receipts went out on bribes. The congressman of the great state of New York, Fiorella LaGuardia, declared it would take a police force of 250,000 people to enforce prohibition in New York City. And another 200,000 would be required to enforce the police force. In Texas, just a few months after the start of prohibition, it still turned out 130 gallons of whiskey a day was found operational on the farm of Senator Mara Shepherd, one of the authors of the 18th Amendment. As the country entered the Great Depression, it was the thought that the jobs and tax revenues that a legal liquor industry would generate looked attractive. So during his presidential campaign in 1932, New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, who never really hid his fondness for a martini called for prohibitions repeal and on December 5th, 1933, prohibition was repealed when the 21st Amendment was ratified. In the 1920s also, American skyscrapers, that architecture came to symbolize ideals of the American spirit. In this case, architecture and design met in the works of two great designers, Paul Frankel and John Stores. You can see they work in the museum here. I encourage you to go check it out. It's fantastic. Influenced by skyscrapers, Frankel and Stores both used a technique known as stepped back profiling. It's when you have the layers of the building moving down, look like steps going up. Step back profiles were used to allow light to enter from the tallest skyscrapers. It was really only done, it was primarily done in New York. For Frankel, it was one of the most interesting and successful lines of furniture while for Stores, it was inspiration for his series of sculptures entitled, Forms in Space. Both are upstairs. You should check them out, truly. Along with everything else, that's a great update. By the end of the 1920s, Americans were overwhelmed by the rise of a modern consumer culture. In response, many of the cultural tensions that had divided us had begun to subside. The growth of exciting new opportunity to buy cars, appliances and stylish clothing made the country's cultural conflict seem less significant. Americans were the first to wear ready-made clothing. We were the first to play electronic photographs, to use electric vacuum cleaners, to listen to commercial radio broadcasts and to drink fresh orange juice year round. The little things. In many ways, the American way of life had been transformed during the 1920s. Cigarettes, cosmetics and synthetic fabrics such as rayon became staples of American life. Newspaper gossip columns illuminated billboards and commercial airplane flights were novelties during the 1920s. The United States became a consumer society. Two automobile titans, Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan symbolized the profound transformation that took place in the America industry during the 1910s and 20s. Ford had revolutionized American manufacturing by introducing the automated assembly line. Reducing productivity or reducing production costs allowed Ford to cut automobile prices and make cars affordable for the average family. Ford also introduced a minimum wage to lower employee turnover and raised productivity and years later reduced his work week from six to five days. He demonstrated the dynamic logic of mass production. It was that expanded production allows manufacturers to reduce costs and therefore increases the number of products sold and that higher wages allow workers to buy more products. Alfred Sloan, on the other hand, the president of General Motors built his company into the world's largest automaker by adopting new approaches to advertising and marketing. His philosophy was blood. The primary objective of the corporation was to make money, not just make cars. Unlike Ford, Sloan was convinced that Americans were willing to pay extra for luxury and prestige. He introduced the yearly model change to convince motorists to trade in old models for newer ones with flashier styling. He also developed a series of automobile divisions differentiated by status, price, and level of luxury. If Ford demonstrated the value of mass production, then Sloan revealed the importance of merchandising in a modern consumer society. In the jazz age, cars were the symbol of the new consumer society. Ford manufacturers and banks encouraged the public to buy the car of their dreams on credit. In 1929, a quart of all American families purchased the car. About 60% bought cars on credit, often paying interest rates of 30% or higher. The automobile industry revolutionized the American way of life and provided an enormous stimulus for the national economy. Alongside the automobile, the telephone and electricity also became emblems of the consumer economy. By 1930, two-thirds of all American households had electricity, and half of American households had telephones. As more and more American homes received electricity, new appliances followed, refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and toasters quickly took hold. Advertisers claimed that labor-saving appliances would ease the sheer physical drudgery of housework. But they did not shorten the average housewife's work week. I'm sure you ladies can appreciate that. Ready-to-wear clothing was another important innovation in America's expanding consumer economy. The nation's first million-dollar advertising campaign, Unita Biscuits, in a waterproof box, demonstrated advertising's power. Installation credit, installment credit, excuse me, soared during the 1920s. Banks offered the country's first home mortgage, a fundamental ship took place in the American economy during the 1920s. The nation's family spent a declining proportion of their income on necessities and an increasing share of on appliances, recreation, and a host of new consumer products. As a result, old industries declined while newer industries surged ahead rapidly. In music, to jazz age was a time for experiments and discovery not only new social and moral identities, but new ways of performing and presenting jazz. The music traveled from New Orleans to Chicago with one of its leading trumpetmen, Joe King Oliver. After settling in Chicago with his Creole Jazz Band, King Oliver sent for his young protege, Louis Armstrong, to join the band. The two men, along with their colleagues, Johnny dies on clarinet, baby dies on drums, Honorary Dutry on the trombone, Bill Johnson on bass, and Armstrong's wife, a little hard and Armstrong on piano, mesmerized listeners with their ability to anticipate what the other person was going to play, almost as if they were one. Technically, the music of the jazz age was an extended version of what had taken place in New Orleans, but with the use of sophisticated arrangements by composers, composers such as the great Jelly Roll Martin, Fletcher Henderson, Horace Henderson, Paul Whiteman, Bill Chalice, and of course, the great Duke Ellington. With the assistance of national radio, the music traveled across the country faster than the musicians could. The belly-known new sound of jazz spread quickly over America and found many supporters, specifically the younger generation. There were important clubs and speakeasies that assisted many ensembles in acquiring their fame and featured their songs. One of the most important clubs in the country at that time was right here in Harlem, the Cotton Club. With all of this greatness, jazz was associated with alcohol, intimate dancing, and socially questionable activities. But that was okay, because everybody had a good time. Right now we're going to play something else for you. It's a piece that was part of that commission work that Caroline spoke about, Untamed Elegance. And it's written about the part of the time in our country when everybody was trying to find their way in experimenting. They were searching and researching. And the country was like a big laboratory. Everybody trying to figure out what was going on. And this piece is entitled, Laboratories of Ideas. We hope if you close your eyes, you will see the 1920s. Aaron Deal on the piano, Marion Felder on the drums, Miss Emma Dayhuff on the bass. This period of time was very exciting for the young in America. It must have been a very frightening time as well, though. I think it was like the first youth movement or the first women's rebellion. That's why I mentioned Emma Last, so y'all can keep that in your mind. Women played an important role throughout the jazz age with their suffrage at its peak with the ratification of the 19th Amendment on August 18, 1920. In the interest of the free-spirited flapper, women began to take on a larger role in society and culture. As a result of World War I, women had a greater responsibility to provide for their families and themselves. There were now new responsibilities for women in terms of a social life and entertainment. John F. Carter, Jr. wrote, I would like to observe the older generation pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us. They give us this thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up. And then they are surprised that we don't accept it with the same enthusiasm with which they received it. The use of the 1920s were now questioning their elders' authority. This, combined with the decades growing of fluency, produced a new breed of youngsters, a breed that were hard-borrowed, heavy-drinking, daring, and hard-partyers. The women of this time, period, seemed to have changed and found their emancipation. They began expressing themselves in ways that they or women before them had not done before. Now women were smoking. Wow. This was a way of declaring their liberation, which caused the sales of cigarettes to double during the decade. For some, clothing was another way to express their liberation. They began wearing undergarments that were relaxed. Him lines raised, and hair was chopped off like a bob cut. And new, more confident and defiant women emerged. One was willing to challenge the male-dominated world. And then there were the flappers, fashionable young women, intent on enjoying themselves in flouting conventional standards of behavior at all costs. They took the dress code to the next level. It was said that they hated to wear the corsets because it discouraged men and made it uncomfortable to do the dances like the black bottom, the shimmy, and the chalster. Therefore, as soon as they arrived at parties, they rushed to the ladies' room and parked their girdles. Prohibition made clandestine drinking an appealing game to the flappers. Some of them took on the sport alongside of men. An item for the industrial area that made the 1920s pleasurable to the young generation again was the automobile. Scott Fitzgeralds told us in the great Gatsby, automobiles were a great source of pleasure and dread. My question was, whose pleasure and whose dread? Teenagers and younger adults quickly discovered the benefits of back seats, leaning to the nickname Struggle Buggy, where many, many make-out sessions took place. Inevitably, the daring clothes, the scandalous dances and the sensual jazz, the late night parties and cynical opinions drew the rage of many members of the older generation. A female evangelist in the Portland, Oregon, wrote, social dancing is the first and easiest step toward hell. The modern dance cheapens womanhood. The first time a girl allows a man to swing her around the dance floor, her instinct tells her she has lost something she would have wanted to treasure. But like young people of then and now, they went right on their heedless way, adopting the new outrageous fashions of the time and singing suggestive songs. Here's one of them I thought you would like. You know what she got to be? I didn't share this one with Dill. She got to be. You know that? Do it like in B-flat. Did she want to? Yeah. No, I'll play. Now, this is jazz right here. I'm going to play the melody. You play it. I'm going to sing it. That's a cat through a McCurve on this one. Anyway, they would say, I'm the sheep of Araby. Your love belongs to me. At night when you're asleep. Into your tent I'll creep. That's enough. Every deal on the piano. Anyway, but as you can imagine, everything was fair game. In fact, there was a beautiful actress who influenced the next piece I'm going to play for you. Her name was Clara Gordon Bow. And she was the it girl. She had it. Oh man, did she have it? And everybody wanted to know what that it was from her. And it's ironic that when movies left the silent film and went to talkies as they called it, they found out that in all of her beauty as a silent filmmaker, it wasn't as attractive because some people were not impressed by her thick Brooklyn voice. So it took somebody it out of the it girl. But anyway, with all that being said, we're going to play a piece for you now, which is the ballad of this sweet untamed elegance. And this is entitled The It Thing. We hope you enjoy. Thank you very much. I don't have my watch on, but my instincts tell me we've been in here quite a bit of time. With great pleasure. But one of the things we would like to do is leave some time to talk. I love to speak to people. Much more than I like to speak at them. So do we have any questions? Maybe we can generate a discussion between all parties. Great. I see Susanna over there with the microphone. So this is a great time. Don't be shy. Don't be shy. How come you talked about women and not the black suffrage? Because it's only an hour. I mean, you know, but you know it's funny. You actually brought me to my closing point, which I'm not ending right now, but I just want you to know. Cooper Hewitt has put out a great book called The Jazz Age. Well, they have a whole gift shop full of great books. But this one book is called The Jazz Age, American Style in the 1920s. And one of the authors is here. Where's Sarah Kaufman? Stand up for him. Let him see you. Be seen. It is a fantastic book, and it covers so much that it's a must have. As I prepared to come back to do this, and I had been studying, I read that whole book, which is quite long. It's 400 pages. I read the whole book on Sunday. It's one of those books that you don't want to put down once you start checking it out. So I really encourage you to go upstairs and get it, take it home with you, buy one for a friend. And it's a must have to learn more about the jazz age. Okay. We have a question up here, Susanna. She's going to bring the mic to you, ma'am. The jazz that is written today resemble the jazz from early days of jazz. I mean, is it all, is the style changing? Well, it's all coming out of the same organism, let's say. I mean, we all come from the same DNA, and so does the music. And each one of us have the opportunity, as Duke Ellington would have said, to be a number one ourselves, not a number two somebody else. So what we have is an opportunity to take what is placed before us via our study of the history of the music and be able to put our own twist on it with respect to knowledge and understanding the guidelines of it, just like those flappers and everybody else broke the rules as it pertained to them, but they stayed inside of certain rules. So it is part of the same continuum of the music. In fact, with my colleagues from Jazz and Lincoln Center here, one of our philosophies is that all jazz is modern, which is why we can play Duke Ellington's Mood Indigo next to Louis Armstrong, Potato Head Blues, and then come back and play something by John Coltrane, and various other people because if you understand the history of the music like you need to understand the history of a nation, then it will help us to make better decisions, not only for ourselves, but for the people around us. So. Can you speak to your own personal creative process in translating visual narratives to sonic narratives and how the two intersect? Well, like Coolidge, I'm going to add a lesson stage of that, but I'm constantly studying and learning. When I was in college, I took a course that was an independent study called Jazz and the Visual Arts, and what I wanted to do was discover how or the two alike, because in my travels, one thing I have realized is that we have more in common than we have different. So if you understand what takes place in the visual arts in terms of dynamics and contrast, dissonance, consonance, rhythm, all those things exist. So it's just a matter of first of all recognizing it, and then if you recognize it, figure out how can you maybe not translate it, but understand it to put it inside of what you're dealing with. So when I'm writing as a composer, I'm trying to deal with a visual, not so much a mathematical equation, which is kind of interesting. I will say that because I used to be a math teacher, but I avoid the mathematical aspect of the music. I understand the theory of it, but the theory is not what people come out to see. They come out to hear the passion of it. So I try to play from a point of view where I'm singing my melodies and trying to see how it relate to Ms. Bo, or a piece like Laboratories of Ideas if you can think of that like a math scientist in a room running all over the place, trying to create things, and, you know, he's alive and all that kind of stuff, and different things like that. So the titles make a difference, you know, and all of that comes together in terms of the visual. So when I first came to the museum here, you know, I was really uninformed. But as I came back like four or five times before getting here, but this is like the beginning of a journey, and it's not about the destination, it's about the travel through it and the people that you meet along the way. So I'm actually in the midst of it, I've learned more and more about this particular aspect of fashion and design and Coupa Hewitt and more about the arts. I also remember one time, we did a concert at Jazz and Lincoln Center called Portraits in Seven Shades, and my colleague Ted Nash wrote a commission work highlighting seven different artists. And I knew most of them, but the work that I was most unfamiliar with was Jackson Pollock. And when I looked at it, I had a discussion with our photographer, who was an art history student. And Frank said, man, look at the rhythm in there. I was like, I'm looking, but I can't see it. And I was constantly looking at it and looking at it. And I never saw it. But what it made me realize is that everybody has a license to paint. So I went and bought acrylics and started painting. So one day I'm gonna put my painting out there and I want y'all to see the lines in my painting to see if y'all can see what I'm seeing. But I always say that in attempt is better than no attempt. So... Well, I actually sort of feel walking through the exhibit that that's what Jazz gave to all those artists. All the things that you're talking about now and reverse the music looking back on that history. When you see how universal the music was through the technology or anything, I feel like all that riff, all that's going on and all the artwork, whether it's the fashion, whether it's the posters, whether it's the furniture, that's the voice Jazz gave to all those artists. Well, I think to extend also that, if you think about Chick Wabs Band in Harlem, yeah, they gave some music to the dancers to dance to. But then the dancers reciprocated back to them. And then they had this dialogue and exchange what was going on. So they gave us, we gave something, but they gave something in return. So a fair exchange is not robbery. So that's a good thing about it. They say that so much of Jazz is improvised. And I find it so fascinating that the Jazz artist doesn't really know if they're going to go in some cases with a composition, if you will. How does that work? I mean, to me, it's like mind boggling. Well, Aaron can tell you, he didn't know what that was going to go with. I asked him to play the Sheik of Arabi, because I know he knows the song, but it was the element of surprise that caught him. But also he demonstrated the courage to create. And that courage to create is what allows you to take the risk, because the greatest things have not come out of repetition of the same thing, but out of the mistakes that have been made. And then the great thing about playing is not about making a mistake, but how do you resolve those particular challenges? In fact, I don't really like to work mistake or wrong. I always call it challenges. Because if I do that, then I have a belief that I can actually resolve it in some particular manner. And sometimes it comes out as desired. And other times it comes out as less than desired. You know, but that's the fun part about it. Because then you have a potential to create something that's great, but if you continue to do the same thing every day, all you're going to do is create something that's repeated. And that's called the riff in jazz. It has this place, too. But the courage to create and the willingness to take a chance is what makes it all worthwhile. In fact, one of my teachers, Wynton's father, Ellis Marcellus, said that in order to be a jazz musician, you have to be willing to make a fool of yourself. So that's the risk we take. Thank you for an amazing, amazing talk. I just wonder, is there any exchange between classical music and jazz? Because, you know, is there any inspiration that you get when you write music from classical music? Well, first of all, one of my favorite classical composers is Aaron Copeland. I like Stravinsky, too, but I like Copeland. Because his music represents the sound of America at that time. To me, it touches me in that way. And he was out checking out jazz musicians during that time to get the sound of what America was like when he wanted to compose. I think the greatest of all musicians do not draw a line in the sand between classical and jazz. In fact, Duke Ellington always said, there's two types of music. Good music and that other stuff. You know? So I think we do, we pull apart from each other and we check each other out. We do collaborations at Jazz and Lincoln Center with the New York Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic. We've been all over the world, we're going to China to play with the New York Philharmonic out there. We're going to be in Prague to play with the orchestra out there. And at the end of the day, you don't care if you're black, white, male, female. What part of the world are you from? All we want to know is can you play? Can you play? We have a question in the back. There's a gentleman in this audience who is a jazz legend and has been responsible for promoting jazz for the last 50 years. Mr. George Ween. You stole my next line. That was my next line, you know? Mr. Ween. I saw him out in the garden. So immediately I got nervous. I was like, wow, Mr. Ween is here. Okay. But he has been not only a great promoter, but a great pianist and a great friend of jazz music throughout the years. And he continues to be a great friend to the music today. And we thank everyone for coming out, but I personally appreciate the fact that Mr. Ween took time out of his time, out of his schedule to come in to see what we were going to do tonight. So thank you. Any more questions? I want to recognize two of my colleagues, Caroline, so eloquently mentioned that there's a collaboration with jazz on Lincoln Center and here in the music. Cat Henry, and I'm not a person of titles anymore, so I can't remember. She's one of our VPs at Jazz on Lincoln Center. Don't be shy, Cat, stand up. Don't have to really give her props. Because when I was commissioned to write this piece, Untamed Delegance, you know, jazz musicians spend a lot of time on music. We don't spend any time on titles. A title is not that important to most of us. So I knew the piece was going to be on the jazz age in the 1920s, and I got all of that. But I didn't present a title to her in her repeated emails to me of we need to know the title. We need to know the title. And people in her position, actually, what they do is they know how to encourage you to submit something. Why don't I submit some titles to you or you can pick from that? So she submitted a title to me. And it was one of maybe five or seven of them, and it was Untamed Delegance. So I didn't actually come up with that title. Sara Velaggio came up with that title. Stand up and let them see you. She's of our marketing department at Jazz and Lincoln Center. So thank you very much. It's really been a pleasure to be here and to not so much speak about the jazz age, but to learn more about the jazz age. As an educator, I think that learning is eternal. You've heard the phrase that if you stop learning, you die. I'm not trying to die. Even though I got my residence at Woodlawn Cemetery, it was an Olsen's in the house. I have a plot out there. That's a running joke. But I live with it. Anybody need to run a space? Call me. It's like a New York apartment. I'll run it to you. For a price. And when I think about jazz and the arts and what we're doing here today, I always remember what the great John Lewis told me. And I had Aaron has to listen to this for the second time in a week because it's not a thing. So whether I'm being repetitive or consistent is based upon an opinion. But my last question to Mr. Lewis is what is jazz? And he said in his opinion jazz had to have three things in it. He needs to have the blues and needs to have syncopation and needs to have the suggestion of swing. Okay, so the jazz age definitely had the blues in it. The country went through a lot. Ups and downs. We went from our highest to our lowest. But we survived. That's what the blues says. It's okay. It's not that great today but tomorrow going to be better. We had syncopation. Man, I know the older generation had no idea what those young kids were going to do. It was a syncopation every moment. Syncopation is basically the unknown if you're driving down the street and somebody blew the horn at you, that's a syncopation. Or if somebody do something that's really unexpected. And finally swinging because throughout all of the adversities our country dealt with they were able to find a way to be in coordination with each other. Somehow. We continually always strive to swing. Even when we play on a bandstand we qualify how well we swing. Sometimes we say we swung okay today. Then other times we swung really hard. That meant we're in groove and in coordination with each other. I'm going to actually use another definition we use at Jazz and Lincoln Center for Swing. We say willful participation with style and coordination. The willful participation is that I think all of y'all for being here tonight y'all could have been doing something else. That's great. I love having y'all here. The style is everybody coming their own way and they all have a different look. All y'all look beautiful our day. The women are gorgeous and the men are handsome. I got to give y'all y'all props. And the coordination is that we all come in the spirit of being together and walking together. Thank you all very much. I like you recognizing Aaron Deal at the piano. Emma Dayhuff on the bass. Marion Felder on the drums. The director. Carolyn Bowman. Caroline Bowman. Pamela Horn. Susanna Brown for all of your help. And the entire Cooper Hewitt family. Thank y'all so much for having us. It's been a pleasure. Have a good night.