In mid-January, the American saxophonist Chris Potter and his band played a much-anticipated concert in Whelan's on Wexford Street, Dublin. As promoter Gerry Godley introduced the band, he paused to lead the packed house in a minute of silence for Potter's contemporary, Michael Brecker, who had died the night before.
Brecker's death, after a two-and-a-half year battle with leukemia, is a huge loss to world music. Admired both by jazz purists and by a wider popular audience, he won 11 Grammy awards and contributed to more than 900 jazz and pop recordings, including sessions with Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon, Diana Ross, Frank Zappa, and many others.
Brecker principally played tenor saxophone, following in the harmonic footsteps of the great John Coltrane. He had commanding technique, a big sound, and an innovative approach to improvisation and composition. He emerged in an era when, thanks largely to Coltrane and other masters such as Sonny Rollins, the tenor sax became identified symbolically as the key instrument in jazz.
Such symbolism is not without political significance. In the century or so since its birth, as jazz has engaged in a long battle for respectability, it often defined itself around the saxophone, a relatively young instrument rarely used in classical music.
Banned by Stalin, called "ugly and whining" by Goebbels, the sax was the precursor of the electric guitar of rock 'n' roll rebellion. The Czech novelist Josef Skvorecky, author of the powerful novella The Bass Saxophone, describes in his writings how the saxophone became a potent emblem of freedom and human expression in Cold War Eastern Europe, where jazz was discouraged and often outlawed.
But totalitarian regimes have not been the only suppressors of jazz. In its early years, its roots in black America attracted the ire of those guardians of public morality, in the US and and elsewhere, who felt threatened by its insistent "African" rhythms, riffs, and dance-inducing syncopations.
As jazz came to dominate American popular music in the 1920s and 1930s, radio stations and dance hall owners tended to favour bland, white versions of the music - such as the Paul Whiteman and Glenn Miller bands - who toned it down to make it more acceptable to white audiences. This mainstream fear of the "devil's music" survived for many decades and infected other black musical forms - ensuring that Elvis Presley's first television performances, for example, showed him only from the waist up.
Ireland had its own anti-jazz movement. Last May, RTÉ Radio re-broadcast Kieran Sheehy's fine 1987 documentary, Down with Jazz, which recalled Fr Peter Conifrey's 1930s campaign to ban jazz in Ireland. On New Year's Day, 1934, Fr Conifrey led a march through Mohill, Co Leitrim, in which demonstrators shouted "Down with jazz" and "Out with paganism" and called on the government to close the dance halls and ban all foreign dances in Ireland. Eamon De Valera sent a representative to the rally and wrote a letter of support.
Jazz, the campaign argued, was "abominable" music that originated in central Africa and was exported to the West by "a gang of wealthy Bolshevists in the USSR to strike at church civilisation throughout the world". Jazz was an "engine of hell" deployed to do the devil's work. The Gaelic League weighed in on the day with an attack on the then Minister for Finance, Seán MacEntee, who, in allowing jazz to be broadcast on Radio Eireann, was "selling the musical soul of the nation for the dividends of sponsored jazz programmes. He is in fact himself jazzing every night of the week!"
Many fans would be delighted if today's Government ministers were jazzing every night of the week. But whether or not Brian Cowen is grooving to Miles Davis, jazz in Ireland is now in a very healthy state. There are many first-rank musicians here, from veterans such as Louis Stewart to a new generation of younger players who have paid their dues in New York and returned to compose, perform, and teach.
Jazz is under-represented on radio, the programmes are good and well-presented. And though the number of educational programmes set up to teach jazz theory and musicianship is sparse, those that do exist are solid - notably the jazz department at Newpark Music Centre in Dublin, headed by Ronan Guilfoyle.
Irish promoters specialising in jazz and world music, such as the Improvised Music Company and Note Productions, are bringing the best of world musicians to Ireland, where venues sensitive to the unique demands of the music have flourished. And most importantly, perhaps, there is an informed, diverse, enthusiastic audience for jazz.
Those audience qualities were most evident at the gig in Whelan's. In the minute of silence for Michael Brecker, the club was filled with great respect - not just for Brecker, you could feel, but for the art of jazz, which has so far survived the challenges of its history and continues to swing its way into a new century.