THE FUNERAL BLUES

He who points a laudatory finger at some manifestation of national life and says. "That is typically American," is bold of the point of foolhardiness. Mr. Otto H. Kahn has pointed his finger at jazz, and said that it is America's one creative effort, something typically American. A first-rate Broadway revue, with its swiftly moving pace, is more an approximation to American art than in imitation grand opera, thinks Mr. Kahn.

If this be so, then it was the French tariff commission, not the French Academy of Music, which procured the deportation from Paris a year ago of five American jazz players. The musicians evidently under-sold their French competitors by importing music, into the country without paying a tariff duty on it, and were properly reprimanded for doing so. If jazz is really the national spirit expressed in music, then those plaintive ditties about "going home my mammy in (insert name of)" should be changed to have home time with capitol dome, and mammy can be the White House cook. This will at once place jazz on the proper national footing. A now Cabinet position must be created immediately, with Irving Berlin as the bearer of its portfolio-saxophone.

But if Mr. Kahn should be wrong, and the national spirit is sung more one hundred per centedly by the motors of Ford cars or the shouts at a ball game, to what music should Mr. Kahn's false prognostications be laid away? Will be order Wagner's Funeral March, or will his swan song be "Pick Me Up and Lay Me Down"?