do truly love is jazz, all of it, but especially the be-bop and cool jazz up to the period of free jazz in the mid-Sixties, when the music started getting more radical under the pressures from pop and rock music. I also always had a soft spot for the blues and have liked what many jazz aficionados look down upon, that is the blues influences in jazz. I have made this episode to reflect some of the genuinely important jazz tunes that are dear to me just as the most treasured rock songs are. Excitement is the same, the sentiment sometimes even deeper. Just as I tried to do in episode 8 about the prog-rock, I have selected the songs that fit into a pop format. Therefore, tonight we listen to a selection of the shorter formats, some of them true beauties that, while distinctly jazz, transcend all boundaries and as such represent well the revolution that happened in the twentieth century. The music became a vehicle for art to reach the masses and outgrow the traditional confines of art as an elite endeavor. Thanks to the blues, rock, pop, and jazz an unprecedented amount of individuals came into direct contact with the true, undiluted, unadulterated, and unfiltered artistic expression. This is the true merit of the twentieth-century pop that changed our civilization, and jazz was first there.
