Music: Those Cool Reds

The wonderful thing about music is how it manages to filter past the most heavily soundproofed door. Though U.S. jazz as such is not officially banned in Russia, the culture commissars take pains to ridicule it as "bourgeois decadency"; concerts are nonexistent and nightclub jazz is discouraged; the importation and sale of U.S. jazz records is taboo. But last week two topflight U.S. Negro jazzmen just back from a month-long trip behind the Iron Curtain had news that the Russians not only know all about U.S. jazz, but play it with fervor whenever...