INFORMED DECISIONS

posted by James Reel

    Terry Teachout thinks it’s a good idea to honor jazz figures with a Pulitzer Prize, but he says that, for a number of reasons, Ornette Coleman’s Sound Grammar did not deserve this year's award. He ponders, as do I, whether the broadening of Pulitzer eligibility will mean that judges will be making even less informed decisions than usual:

I also wonder how many judges likely to be tapped for future Pulitzer juries will be equally competent to weigh the relative merits of jazz and pop albums and written-out classical compositions. In a perfect world, all musicians would be as familiar with Duke Ellington as they were with Aaron Copland--and some of them are. In practice, though, it's comparatively uncommon for classical musicians to have extensive knowledge of jazz, or vice versa. Yehudi Wyner, the classical composer and Pulitzer laureate who chaired this year's jury, acknowledged this fact by recommending to the Pulitzer Board that separate prizes be given to classical and nonclassical music, which strikes me as a realistic response to an otherwise insoluble problem.