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A DANCE TO A DIFFERENT DRUMMER By the mid-to-late 1930s jazz had become the defining music of the generation, the generation that was then coming into its teens. Jazz seemed to unleash forces and energies like rock 'n roll did twenty years later. Like rock 'n roll, too, jazz possessed a definite physicality; it released pent-up emotions; it was pure pleasure; it was a form of escape and it was entertainment. As jazz emerged so, too, did Baha'i Administration. In 1937 Baha'i Administration had developed from a small number of groups to possess and enjoy a national consciousness. This development led to a systematic teaching program entitled the Seven Year Plan. Between Benny Goodman becoming that generation's icon of popular music by playing at Times Square to a packed house of teenagers in the Paramount Theatre in March of 1937 and his band's contest with Chick Webb's band at the Savoy Ballroom in May of 1937, this Seven Year Plan began. -Ron Price with thanks to "Episode Five: Jazz: Pure Pleasure," ABC TV, 9:30-10:30 pm, 27/10/2001. It exploded, completely unknown, overnight, or so it seemed to the generation who began that Plan in '37. In reality, it had been slowly developing in theory and form for nearly a century.....if you go back to that magic year of 1844 when the first message went across that telegraph wire with" What hath God wrought?"...and He had wrought.... Jazz was becoming popular the way we would have liked to be popular, but our Plan was a slow-release model, an experimental disposition, a dance to a different drummer, with the light, lyrical, exquisite touch of an Eddy Wilson, often sad, slow pace of a Billy Holliday or a Glen Miller popular romantic- swing, yes, those were swing times. Men and women working together, composing on-the-spot, everyone in harmony, moving toward elegance and joy: that was one way of defining what our aim was too in those early Baha'i Groups and Assemblies beginning in those first-days-of-form, days of, that Administrative vision when we started our dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, yes, yes.(1) (1) When Duke Ellington was asked what he was doing when he was playing jazz on the piano, he said "I'm dreaming." Ron Price Updated for artfreaks.com On: 3/12/
