Currently one of the least fashionable ways of looking at jazz is from the perspective of ‘classical’ music – a label still used in record shops, and still understood instinctively by almost everybody, in spite of its avoidance by commentators who have yet to find an acceptable substitute. (Of the alternative terms, ‘art music’ is just as politically incorrect as ‘classical’, while ‘concert music’ can be applied to almost everything; in America, classical music is deemed to be ‘European’ in a simplistic antithesis to African-American traditions.) The once common notion that jazz might be thought of as ‘America's classical music’ has long been discredited. Yet no amount of quibbling about labels will make the parallels between the classical and jazz worlds go away; and those who insist on the uniqueness of jazz and its incompatability with essential characteristics of classical music cut themselves off from the richness of allusion and crossover at the heart of all the best western music of the twentieth century. It was perhaps because of this limited outlook that Duke Ellington, on his own admission, stopped using the word ‘jazz’ in 1943 (ibid., 452).