"Some of the wise boys who say my music is loud, blatant and that's all should see the faces of the kids who have driven a hundred miles through the snow to see the band... to stand in front of the bandstand in an ecstasy all their own"

Kenton draws a bright line between the courtroom of criticism and the sanctuary of the bandstand. By calling detractors “wise boys,” he hints at a smug, bookish certainty that reduces music to adjectives, loud, blatant, while missing the lived experience. He counters with a simple piece of evidence: faces. Not measurements, not theory, but the visible transformation of listeners who brave distance and weather to be near the sound. Those faces, flushed from the cold and lit by the band’s force, testify to a form of understanding that can’t be footnoted.

The snowy drive is more than a detail; it is a pilgrimage. It suggests that music’s value appears not in the abstract but in the body’s willingness to move, across miles, into discomfort, through risk, toward an encounter. That arrival culminates in “ecstasy,” a word of ritual and transcendence. The kids at the rail aren’t consuming; they’re participating. Their ecstasy is “their own,” a private yet communal charge that takes shape only in the presence of volume, immediacy, and shared time.

There’s a defense of artistic boldness here, but also a claim about authority. Taste-makers may label the sound as excess, yet the audience’s rapture is a kind of verdict. Loudness becomes not a flaw but a pathway, a physical conduit that touches what analysis overlooks: how rhythm organizes bodies, how harmony opens emotional weather, how a brass section can feel like sunlight breaking through a storm. Kenton implies that music’s truth lives where sweat, breath, and risk converge.

He also stakes a place for youth as cultural barometer. The kids’ devotion signals possibility, an appetite for intensity and experiment that critics might be too cautious to admit. If art makes people travel, if it warms a crowd shivering at the lip of the stage, then the so-called blatancy is a generosity: a big sound for a big hunger. The faces say more than the review.