Scott Johnson: "Much of the old tradition's ability to speak to non-specialists by producing direct emotional experiences has now been bottled and shipped to Hollywood, much of its historical capacity for complexity has been condensed and stored in academia, and much of its propensity for synthesis and absorption has collected within the downtown wing of new music, after varying degrees of hybridization with modernism's experimentalist spirit. Here, some of what remains of the European tradition's ability to forge popular styles into unexpected forms mingles with experimentalists from the self-supporting world of jazz and with the homegrown avant-gardes that periodically branch out from rock and roll"