James Moody will celebrate his 82nd birthday with a performance at B.B. King’s Blues Club and Grill on March 26th, 2007. All proceeds from the event will go to the James Moody Scholarship Endowment Fund.

Roy Haynes will celebrate his 85th Birthday with special guest Chick Corea Friday, March 19, 2010 at The Blue Note. (New York Times)

Jazz musicians, like hippies, represent a sensibility continually replenished but whose founding—one is tempted to say “actual”—membership is well into its winter years. The new ones are not quite the same—they practice the same craft, but are tempered and diverse, seemingly dilute. The old guard in jazz have attained the social status of generals in popular wars—some keep their posts, gray-haired and decorated, and continue to lead smokeless drills in Greenwich Village; others have retired, and spend their time sitting on symposia and contributing to public works. Their pronouncements are hollow, wearied, conservative. Occasionally they are drawn in by organizers of bloodless reenactments, but their lives are quiet and distinguished. They remain in the public imagination hung with their medals and remembered by their involvements—in the company of Miles Davis or Dizzy Gillespie.

They are publicly remembered for having participated at whichever turning point, and no one but the most brazen grognard bickers about which was the most effective, and there are few gossipers interested in unearthing whatever inconvenient historical facts could possibly tarnish their statued leaders. All were on the same side, most have survived admirably. They are rosy and comforting figures, largely unrewarded but still appreciated—with a generalized, dim gratitude. They are shaded with quiet, mostly unpolitical nobility. Far from being thought of as entertainers, as the impulsive and polarizing face of a fashion, they are an unrecognized, anonymous, anointed corps. A slowly disbanding army of secular saints.