Music is the result of thought in the form of attitude. There is no one way of thinking, since men’s values are as scattered and dissi milar as individual men themselves. If black music can be seen as the result of certain attitudes, certain specific ways of thinking about the world, then my basic hypothesis about music is understood. The black man’s music changed as the changed, reflecting shifting attitudes or consistent attitudes within changing contexts. It is why the music changing seems most important to me. When jazz f i rst began to appear on the American scene during the twenties, in one form or another, it was introduced in many instances by white Americans. Yet its original conception and its most vital development were the result of certain attitudes, or experiential ideas, attributable to the Afro -American culture. Jazz as played by white musicians was not the same as that played by black musicians nor was there any reason for it to be. The music of the white jazz musician was , at its most profound, a learned art. The blues, for example, which I take to be an independent black music, was practically ignored in pre-jazz white American culture. Blues is an extremely important part of jazz. However, the way in which jazz utilizes the blues “ attitude” provided a musical analogy the white musician could understand, and thus he could arrive at a style of jazz music. The white musi cian understood the blues f ir st as music, but seldom as an attitude, since the attitude of the white musician was necessarily quite a diff erent one. And in many cases, it was not consistent with the making of jazz. Thus, the trumpets of Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong were dissimilar. The white middle-class boy from Iowa was an inborn intellectual and had an emotional life that was based on his conscious or unconscious disapproval of most of the custom of his culture. On the other hand, Armstrong was, in terms of an emotional model, an honored priest of his culture. He was not rebelling against anything with his music. The incredible irony of the situation was that both stood in similar places in the superstructure of American society: Beiderbecke, because of his isolation and departure from mass culture; and Armstrong, because of the soci al -historical separation of the black man from the rest of Ameri can.