Something had happened in non-jazz popular music, too: rockabilly, rock 'n' roll, rhythm 'n' blues and so-called "folk music" all heralded the change, which gained momentum by the rapidly multiplying number of young music consumers, products of the post World War II baby boom. I was among these, born on the south side of Chicago in 1950, raised on the white side of Stony Island, a commercial boulevard which served as a racial divide.

For a lot of reasons, chief among them precocious snobbery, I never considered myself a fan of pop and rock. But there was no ignoring the names of that era, or their sounds. The music of Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Liberace, Spike Jones was everywhere in the air. And when the Beatles hit the U.S. in '63, with the Rolling Stones and the rest of the British invasion close behind...well, the future was cast.

The older-timers were still around, yes. But they were hard pressed to get the work and attract the crowds they needed to survive. Of course they resented the brash, often unsophisticated music that displaced them.

Besides those musicans, there were diehard fans who kept their favored musics going. Through the dogged efforts of Joe Segal, a devotee of "modern jazz" (especially bebop), grizzled yet suave hard-jazz blowers like saxophonists Coleman Hawkins, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Jimmy Forrest, Johnny Griffin, Jimmy Heath and James Moody (with his irrepressible pal singer Eddie Jefferson) performed with local rhythm sections on Sunday afternoons in a rented-out party room of Chicago's North Park Hotel. Kids under drinking age were admitted to the North Park sessions, as they were at few other jazz venues. But not many came. For all the enviable swagger of the jazzmen, to teenagers there was something rather musty about them: their suits, their hats, the overly-familiar songs they started with, the ching-ching-a-ling beat, the initially indecipherable streams of notes they played.

But be patient, listen, think—these guys had something that was powerful, still. They could cast a spell that held adults rapt and gratified, without benefit of sheet music, flashy moves or silly costumes, practicing only their mysterious, self-contained art.

In the mid '60s my folks had moved to the suburbs, and we went as a family to hear jazz at a shopping mall. Duke Ellington's orchestra, Count Basie's band, Woody Herman's Herd and a quartet led by Stan Getz that featured Gary Burton, Steve Swallow and Roy Haynes -- they all had gigs in the parking lot of Old Orchard (or was it Edens Plaza?), probably to draw those shoppers nostalgic for swing and the big bands, repelled by burgeoning new nightspots such as the Electric Theater (later renamed the Kinetic Playground).

There was odd jazz then, too: Sun Ra's Arkestra, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Yusef Lateef delved into exotic forms of expression that was less predictable than the polished chordal extrapolations of the North Park swing-boppers, but not blunt as the rock stuff, either. There were commercial appearances of jazz gestures—how could any teen boy not get off on Henry Mancini's "Theme Song for "Peter Gunn"? There was jazz that was urgent and chaotic, whatever its players' reputations. I heard John Coltrane at the Down Beat Jazz festival of 1965 at Soldier's Field and could make nothing of the windstorm he and Archie Shepp stirred up, except that it was dead serious art— otherwise why would they bother?

Exiled in suburbia, I still wanted to explore the city, and in the first year of my coveted drivers' license I'd take off on weekend nights for Hyde Park, the integrated neighborhood surrounding University of Chicago, to attend events produced by a colorful group who called themselves the AACM, Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Its members were all black, but I was fascinated by the intensity and strangeness of their outpourings, and was never discouraged in my curiosity.

By then I'd discovered the Jazz Record Mart, too, where I hung out in my abundance of spare time, sweeping the floor to justify hours spent listening to records, talking to Hank the Crank, washboard player for some scraggly trad bands, and Big Joe Williams, the bluesman who tried to sell me his old Ford. Arvella Grey, a blind preacher, strummed a tuneless steel National guitar and sang "John Henry" for hours on end outside the JRM, which was located near the entrance to a subway station, so there was a constant flow of folks who'd poke their heads in the door wanting the hit-of-the month. Curtis Mayfield's Superfly was a big seller. Then they'd drop some coins in Arvella's cup.

Jim, the red-haired, black clad Zen hipster who ran the store for the owner (and Delmark Records principal) Bob Koester, felt he could seduce anyone into buying Kind of Blue, and perhaps persuade them to check out Coltrane's Ballads or his album with smooth baritone Johnny Hartman, and by then he'd have them hooked. Kalaparusha—he'd changed his name from Maurice McIntyre just weeks after the covers of his Delmark debut were printed—was a shipping clerk, a job previously held by harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite. Tough blues guitarist Jimmy Dawkins used to show up at the store, maybe to collect a check; he always had a restless German shepard in his station wagon parked outside.

And sometimes dapper Junior Wells called on the phone. His Hoodoo Man Blues with a guitarist named "Friendly Chap" turned me on as perfectly controlled, utterly contemporary city music, infectious as Aretha Franklin's radio hits or James Brown's "Popcorn" and "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag." This wasn't the corny country blues I'd been trying to avoid, the "folk music" sung by tired old men. Though my mind changed about that, too, after one blazing hot afternoon at the Ann Arbor Blues festival when I heard Son House, Lightnin' Hopkins, Fred McDowell, Sleepy John Estes, John Lee Hooker and a host of other lately re-discovered bluesmen who'd been at it all their lives).

My point is all the music was all rolled together then. Like the American population itself--like television, which mixed comedy, drama, news, variety shows and sports all on one small screen--music was becoming increasingly integrated. Concert tickets weren't very expensive; almost anyone who wanted to could check out any kind of music, test their vestigal prejudices about genre, race, age, rhythm, consonance and dissonance. Not just kids like me; talking to musicians later, I learned that they, too, had been hearing everything, trying to figure it out and put the elements together in some subjectively satisfying way.

That was the task of the times, and sometimes we were confounded.

No, we didn't always get it—how could we? No one had heard anything like some of this music before. Still, it was respected, like the old-style blues and swing and gospel, because it sought to be truthful to itself. The black community seemed to believe music conveyed something that was essentially honest about life, beyond a diverting beat and hummable tune. The musicians I spoke with didn't reject their heritage as I rejected the big bands, the songs of musical theater and catchy, kitchy stuff like "Doggie In The Window" or "Maresedoats." The black musicians, especially, seemed humble about what they'd grown up with even as they tried to get beyond it. They made their ways in the world taking art as a gift, a weapon of attack and defence, a guide.

Okay: when I was a lad the Titans still lived, and giants walked the earth. I have their posters, even today: an etching of a Medusa announcing Joseph Jarman's Quartet; a red outline of a black bluesman printed on a silver background, aside a schedule promising Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker and Magic Sam; plump Cannonball Adderley, his hooded eyes slightly sardonic, coming to the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle campus student union.

The Titans died off soon, though, and the giants shrunk to size.

The jazz musicians who survived the era are now mere mortals, inevitably aged and coping with changes. They've dealt with 40 years of social and economic changes, new music technologies and new international opportunities, often paving the way for more mainstream segments of society. The jazz musicians are way out front, as self-possessed, self-employed, self-invented, self-respecting artists, discovering new models of group behavior through spontaneous interactive play.

The Janus age is over now -- I guess -- though the old music lives on and we can listen to it, love it, in the here and now. The grandchildren of the elder who reach back, trying to capture the glorious golden era, can't help but fail. They overlook and underestimate their immediate predecessors, and seem to deny that the moves the '60s, '70s and '80s players made were inevitable and of great consequence.

But there is no going back. We can't be our grandfathers or our fathers, however much they informed us. We can only be ourselves, revering our history but living forward. Things have changed since the '30s, '40s, '50s and '60s, yes. In fact, the rate of change seems to be speeding up, gaining momentum as though in free fall.

There is no denying, evading, or sparing ourselves the necessity of change, however much we dislike it, however much we want to hold onto our forefathers and lay claim to their powers. We must let go of those who came before us—not hold them responsible for the work we have to do, but understand them in their own times and apply what we learn along with an appreciation of the unique present, so we shape life now as we need to.

For the living, there is memory, but memory comes with the onrush of experience, accruing as we go. Change is the engine of the universe, which is never static. Oh, when I was a lad. . .

Spare change, buddy?