Radio: Chamber Music Blues

"It cuts you to pieces," said a man.

"I'm in pieces," said a lady, falling over a chair.

It was about 2 a.m. in the Palm Room at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria. For four hours various jazz musicians, drifting in from the hotspots, had been showing a roomful of bigwig musicians and assorted guests that jazz is serious. At the moment a hot guitarist, academically introduced as a "demonstrator of social and protest blues," was beginning to take effect on listeners like Conductor Wilfred Pelletier of the Metropolitan Opera. Soon Benny Goodman arrived, said "Hi" to the assembled thinkers and blew into his clarinet. In...