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or appreciate about jazz music after about 1960. I just can't
hear it. I just dismiss it cold. From the days of Thelonious
Monk and Miles Davis, I'm dead. I can go through Fats Domino and
Elvis Presley, and then I've had it. But Presley didn't mean
anything to me because it was this sort of return to the womb,
and so was Fats Domino.

Riess: Why?

Newhall: I don't know. It just--. Elvis Presley and Fats Domino lived on
about three chords, and I was going to get into the harmonics a
little later if you wanted, because there's a very important
thing about the harmony in all of this, too.

Riess: You were talking about these people, these university people who
were amassing collections of records.

Newhall: Some of them. I mean, it was the Berkeley Hills crowd. Peter--
his mother lived over there. It was an old San Francisco family
who moved up to Inverness finally. Peter Whitney. He was an
intellectual . I'm very fond of him. I think he's still alive.
He grew a beard. He went to work in World War II with the New
York Times as a correspondent. He started at the Chronicle,
incidentally; he wrote the paper's first jazz column, called
"Jive."

There was a whole cult of fans in San Francisco and I assume
in Berkeley probably even more, a cult built around a renaissance
of what some people called Dixieland . It was this strange
intermingling of the races in this case . There was the Yerba
Buena Jazz Band and Lou Waters--I guess Lou Waters has died--Lou
built up around him some remarkable musicians. There was Wally
Rose , who ' s still alive. He was a pianist. Bob Scobie was one
of the greatest trumpeters . He was a good friend of mine, Bob
was . That was right after World War II, Lou Waters and that
crowd .

I think World War II was probably a fantastic milestone in
the history of American popular music. In World War II, the
whole world , the whole Allied side of the world, was dancing to
the jitterbug music and singing the songs of both Tin Pan Alley
and the black rhythm--in other words , the Benny Goodman, the big
band numbers . "I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo" was very big .

Musically World War II was something like a Roman Catholic
Mass: it was the same all over the world, no matter where you
went. And you would hear the same music and see the same people
dancing in every country of the Western world, only they had
different names , of course . In World War II music and jazz was a