Stand on any busy street and watch the jazz faces among the young people who pass. The sophisticated faces of fifteen-year-olds. Faces over which all the emotions of maturity have passed. Artificial intensity, the result of living and especially ‘emoting’ at high pressure, is mirrored there. A super-strenuosity, nervous, almost hysterical, shows itself in walk, gestures, in voice, in all actions.

The passion to be always on the go, the desire to be always in a high-keyed excitement, to be keenly alive even though falsely stimulated, and to live much, even though indiscriminately, is the mental world in which many are living.

The jazz music starts it, they say.