6
Jazz: From the Gutter to the Mainstream
In the first half of the twentieth century – for reasons of intellectual snobbery, the American cultural inferiority complex, associations with “low life,” racism, and misunderstanding – jazz and practitioners of jazz experienced a general miasma of disdain mixed with gradually increasing glimmers of appreciation. This gradual change in the acceptability of jazz as a topic of serious interest over the first half of the twentieth century can be demonstrated by a survey of music history books, journals, and articles in both specialized and popular magazines over that period. The change was also no doubt due to a growing respect among the white population for African-American intellectual and cultural figures and to a growing familiarity with the music. Jazz experienced a roller-coaster ride in the annals of American respectability and acceptance over the first half-century of its existence, but the trend was gradually upwards, and in the 1950s jazz entered the mainstream of American intellectual life.
General histories of music published in the US were very slow to show interest in any American music, let alone in jazz. From 1870, when the first general music history book (The History of Music by Frédéric Ritter) was published in the United States, and for many decades thereafter, American music received no mention. This pattern was followed until the early 1940s. Implicit in all these books (and indeed in concert and artistic life through most of the country during those years) was the view that significant and civilized culture belonged to Europe, with its over 2,000-year history of art and poetry and documented music making, and that America would become cultivated only in proportion to its emulation of the European tradition (Hitchcock 1986).
Even when American music was the subject of a specialized history book, most authors were interested only in “high-art” or European-influenced classical music. Ritter, the author of the first general history of music, turned in 1883 to the American scene. His book, Music in America, discussed classical music exclusively, as did Louis Elson’s The History of American Music (1904) and William Hubbard’s History of American Music (1908). In 1916 the musicologist, librarian, and scholar Oscar Sonneck urged historians to deal with the actuality of music making in America and to focus on what was characteristic about American music rather than on its similarities to music from Europe. Sonneck’s suggestions were only partially adopted by John Howard, whose Our American Music of 1931 was the first to include a discussion of folk music in America. But Howard’s view was still informed by that of earlier scholars: America was a wilderness, needing to be civilized by the ancient musical traditions of Europe (Hitchcock 1986, Matthews 1986, Newsom and Hitchcock 1986).
The first published appearance of the word “jazz” seems to have been in an article in the sports pages of a San Francisco newspaper in 1913, which reported that a local baseball team had hired a band to entertain the players, and that the musicians had plenty of “jazz,” which the writer defined as “pep” or “enthusiasm” (Collier 1988: 6). In 1917, the year of the first jazz recordings, in one of the earliest published articles on jazz, Walter Kingsley was of two minds about the qualities of jazz (and the nature of its practitioners):
Jazz music is the delirium tremens of syncopation. It is strict rhythm without melody. To-day the jazz bands take popular tunes and rag them to death to make jazz. … [On the other hand] jazz is based on the savage musician’s wonderful gift for progressive retarding and acceleration guided by his sense of “swing”.
(Kingsley, quoted in Walser 1999: 6–7)
(To “rag” a tune meant to play it in syncopated rhythm. Note the mixture of disdain and admiration in the description.) However, the first recordings soon became best-sellers, and the band that made them, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, soon became extremely popular (and very highly paid) and spawned several imitators. A dance journal wrote in 1917, “The jazz band idea is sweeping the country. … Wherever you go, you hear jazz music” (quoted in Collier 1988: 7–8).
But views on this music were decidedly mixed. Even the local newspaper in the birthplace of American jazz, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, declared in an editorial of 1918 that jazz performances were “manifestations of a low streak in man’s tastes” (quoted in Collier 1988: 5).
A year later, however, the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet wrote a (deeply patronizing) appreciation of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra and especially its clarinetist Sidney Bechet:
There is in the Southern Syncopated Orchestra an extraordinary clarinet virtuoso … [His solos] are admirable equally for their richness of invention, their force of accent, and their daring novelty and unexpected turns. … what a moving thing it is to meet this black, fat boy with white teeth and narrow forehead, who is very glad one likes what he does, but can say nothing of his art, except that he follows his “own way” – and then one considers that perhaps his “own way” is the highway along which the whole world will swing tomorrow.
(quoted in Walser 1999: 11)
But in 1920 Living Age magazine described jazz as producing “a sound more indicative of Hell than of Heaven” (quoted in Collier 1988: 9).
During the so-called “Jazz Age,” many people deplored the sounds and the social consequences of the music. In 1921 the town of Zion, Illinois, banned jazz, having determined that, together with alcohol and tobacco, it was a sin (Pearson 1994: 52, n.1).
In 1924 Marion Bauer, an American musicologist, wrote about jazz for a French music journal:
“Jazz” is the true child of the age; but one shouldn’t forget that it is also the child of the dregs of the civilized world and that it comes from the lower classes of society. The dances that have penetrated everywhere, in our salons, in our ballrooms, were created in a quarter of San Francisco … where one finds the outcasts of ports, the scum of all nations and all the races; it would take the alchemy of magicians to turn material from such vile origins into a true masterpiece!
(quoted in Porter 1997: 131)
A number of clever and derisive definitions of the word jazz were reported in a 1925 editorial by Charles S. Johnson in Opportunity:
There is a new international word – Jazz. … The Etymological Dictionary of Modern English defines it as “a number of niggers surrounded by noise. … ” … Horatio Parker, an American composer of note … calls it “naked African rhythm, and no more.” … Henry Van Dyck … referred to it before the National Education Association as “a species of music invented by demons for the torture of imbeciles.” … [One intellectual remarked:] “Some happy day, we shall beat our swords into ploughshares and our jazz bands into unconsciousness.”
(quoted in Porter 1997: 122)
One unusual clergyman, Rev. Charles Stelzle, was moved in 1925 to wonder about the positive significance of jazz. “Jazz is not necessarily the gateway to hell,” he wrote. “It may be the portal to life eternal” (quoted in Meltzer 1993: 53). But the Baptist pastor Dr John Roach Straton was moved to invoke the same metaphor when he was interviewed about jazz in an article in the New York Times in May 1926. The article, entitled “Straton Says Jazz is ‘Agency of Devil,’ ” suggests that Dr Straton regarded the growth of jazz as synonymous with a general tendency towards an overall collapse of civilization:
“If I were asked to answer in a single sentence, ‘what shall we do about jazz,’ I would reply that we ought to consign it to a hotter place than this earth,” said Dr Straton. “I have no patience with this modern jazz tendency, whether it be in music, science, social life or religion. It is part of the lawless spirit which is being manifested in many departments of life, endangering our civilization in its general revolt against authority and established order. Jazz music is just as much a revolt against the standards of modesty and decency as is the jazz tendency in dress.
“Jazz, with its discord, its appeal to the sensuous, should be stamped out. The jazz hound is an outlaw and a musical bandit. Like the gunman, he is running amuck and should be relentlessly put down. … ”
(quoted in Porter 1997: 143–4)
Even black journalists compared jazz unfavorably with classical concert music. In 1929 in the black newspaper The Chicago Defender Dave Peyton advised the musicians among his readers to make sure that they practiced assiduously: “ … if you are in a jazz band do not give up proper study on your instrument. You may be called upon to render real service and to play good music. … Jazz is on the wane, and the better class of music is coming back into favor with the critical public” (quoted in Walser 1999: 58–9, my italics).
Some black writers began to see jazz as the proud manifestation of a separate and worthy culture. Novelist, essayist, critic, and poet Langston Hughes was a member of the circle of black writers and musicians whose work contributed to the phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance. He wrote poetry to be accompanied by jazz and poems that tried to capture “the meanings and rhythms of jazz.” His first book of verse was entitled The Weary Blues (1926). In an essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” in The Nation in 1926, he wrote: “Jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America” (quoted in Walser 1999: 56).
And in the 1920s jazz began to attract serious and enthusiastic attention both in the United States and abroad. In 1926 the self-styled “jazz missionary” and bandleader Paul Whiteman published a book called simply Jazz, about the music (and himself) (Whiteman and McBride 1926: 295). And in the same year Henry Osgood’s So This Is Jazz appeared, a book the author regarded as “the first attempt to set down a connected account of the origin, history, and development of jazz music” (Osgood 1926: vii). The English writer Robert Mendl’s book The Appeal of Jazz was published in London in 1927. Mendl wrote, “I find in [jazz] an abundance – sometimes a superabundance – of vigor; a rhythmic verve so exhilarating that one can hardly keep one’s feet still … ” (Mendl 1927: 65).
By the end of the 1920s the mastery of one particular jazzman, Duke Ellington, was beginning to be noticed in the white press. An article in The Bookman in 1929 commented:
Duke Ellington’s Orchestra (also known as The Washingtonians), especially when playing its leader’s own dance-tunes, is dogmatically pronounced to be supreme in this field. … There is more and better melody in one of the dances of this astounding Negro than in ten of the pallid tunes of the average operetta …
(quoted in Porter 1997: 157)
Ellington’s work was also praised by an English writer, Constant Lambert, who was himself a composer and a conductor. In his book Music Ho!, published in 1934, Lambert seemed genuinely enthusiastic about Ellington’s work (though he patronized both Ellington and blacks in general and was a vicious anti-Semite):
The best records of Duke Ellington … can be listened to again and again because they are not just decorations of a familiar shape but a new arrangement of shapes. Ellington, in fact, is a real composer, the first jazz composer of distinction, and the first negro composer of distinction.
(quoted in Porter, 1997: 155, 153–4)
General appreciation of the music, however, was still tempered by the persistence of old attitudes. In 1934 the satirist and social commentator H. L. Mencken excoriated the sounds of jazz as “unpleasant,” “crude banalities,” its beat as “monotonous,” and its tunes as “rubbish fit only for tin whistles” (Baltimore Evening Sun, September 3, 1934).
Much of the early writing on jazz came from Europe. In 1932, the Belgian Robert Goffin published Aux frontières du jazz, a personal appreciation (never translated into English) that distinguished between the whitened, concertized version of jazz as purveyed by arrangers such as Paul Whiteman (whom Goffin cleverly called his “bête blanche”) and the real thing (Feather 1966: 722). In 1934, the same year as the Englishman Lambert’s book, the French writer Hugues Panassié, who was one of the founders of the famous Hot Club de France and editor of the journal Jazz hot, wrote another of the early books that made a serious study of jazz. In Le jazz hot (1934) translated in 1936 as Hot Jazz: The Guide to Swing Music, the author praised the special characteristics of jazz and tried to identify those elements that made it “hot,” “authentic,” and “true” as opposed to “sweet” or “imitation.” The book features a brief foreword by Louis Armstrong, Panassié’s “greatest of all hot soloists” (Panassié 1936: 19, 291, 51). In the same year as Panassié’s book, Armstrong himself published a brief anecdotal autobiography, not always in his own words, entitled Swing That Music, which contains some important recollections about the earliest years of jazz (Armstrong 1936). The insightful introduction is by Armstrong champion and famous crooner Rudy Vallee. And yet not all Europeans were enthusiastic about jazz. Georges Duhamel, in his fear of the Americanization of his country, wrote in 1931 that jazz was “a triumph of barbaric folly” (Duhamel 1931: 121).
A significant but often overlooked indicator of the slowly growing popularity of jazz was the publication of jazz discographies. The earliest of these were also published in Europe. In 1936, Charles Delaunay’s Hot Discography appeared in Paris and a few years later was reprinted in New York. Delaunay was the cofounder, with Panassié, of Jazz hot, and seems to have coined the word “discography” (Atkins 1982). And in the same year another jazz discography, Rhythm on Record, by Hilton Schleman, who was a record company publicist, was printed in London.
One American writer, Helen Kaufmann, a self-described “music-lover,” wrote what she called a “cheery bird’s-eye view” of American music in 1937. Her From Jehovah to Jazz refers often to the European enthusiasm for jazz and suggests that Americans might learn from it (“Jazz is said in Europe to be the distinctive contribution of America to music, an assertion resented with some justice in serious musical circles here, for [jazz] has long been regarded askance as the cheap and vulgar outlet of the uncultured.” “In Europe it is taken seriously as a valuable addition to musical literature, although in America, outside of its own amusement realm, it has not yet attained any such recognition”). Her writing is strongly colored by contemporary patronizing attitudes towards “negroes” and others, but she covers early psalm singing, the music of American Indians, folk music, spirituals, school songs, ballads, amateur music making, minstrel shows, blues, ragtime, and swing, and she speaks enthusiastically of Gershwin, Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, Ellington, and the Goodman Quartet, with Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, and Gene Krupa (Kaufmann 1937: ix–x, 270, x). In the same year, Waldo Frank suggested that jazz was an echo of the Industrial Revolution. “This song is not an escape from the Machine to the limpid depths of the soul. It is the Machine itself! It is the music of a revolt that fails. Its voice is the mimicry of our industrial havoc.” And in a startlingly suggestive metaphor he wrote: “Jazz is a moment’s gaiety, after which the spirit droops, cheated and unnurtured” (Frank 1937: 119).
By the end of the 1930s, swing bands had turned jazz into a widely popular phenomenon. An editorial in Opportunity, published in the summer of 1938, described the scene:
A few Sundays ago upwards of twenty thousand people, according to press reports, attended a “swing” carnival at Randalls Island, New York City. … It remained, however, for Duke Ellington and his orchestra to send the crowd into such rapture that for a few minutes it appeared that a riot was imminent as thousands of swing-crazed young men and women broke over the barriers and attempted to storm the bandstand.
(quoted in Porter 1997: 159–60)
More books on jazz were beginning to be published, and jazz musicians were beginning to be taken seriously. Two jazz concerts were given at the shrine of classical music performance, Carnegie Hall, in 1938. Benny Goodman was invited to speak and teach at the most prestigious institute for classical music in the country, the Juilliard School of Music in New York (Porter 1997: 162). In the late 1930s Goodman became famous for playing classical music as well as jazz. In 1938 he released a recording of the Mozart Clarinet Quintet (with the Budapest String Quartet) and appeared in a classical music recital at Town Hall in New York. In 1939 Goodman performed in Carnegie Hall a new work he had commissioned from Béla Bartók. That same year Goodman published an autobiographical book, The Kingdom of Swing, about jazz and his life in it, culminating with his recent triumphs.1 In 1939 Alain Locke, a professor of philosophy at Howard University, wrote in Opportunity:
The music season just closing has been one grand crescendo for Negro music, with almost too many events and too wide an up-swing to be adequately chronicled in a single article. … But the predicament is a pleasant one, since it does vindicate our title [“Negro Music Goes to Par”] as a fair and honest assessment of the musical situation. This year Negro music has really gone to par.
(quoted in Porter 1997: 163)
In 1939 Charles Edward Smith and Fred Ramsey published Jazzmen: The Story of Hot Jazz Told in the Lives of the Men Who Created It, an important early anthology of writing about the musicians of jazz. Smith later went on to become one of the founding members of the Institute for Jazz Studies.
A serious discussion of American music in a general book on music history first came in 1940, when Howard McKinney and William Anderson published their Music in History: The Evolution of an Art. In addition to some passing mentions of Gershwin and Copland, Music in History devotes the last 18 pages (out of about 900) to “American Hopes.” This book was one of the first general music history books to consider jazz seriously. The authors adopt the (for the time) revolutionary approach of dividing American music into three (implicitly equal) streams: folk music, “serious” music, and “popular” music, the last of which includes the songs of Stephen Foster, comic operas, Sousa marches, ragtime, the blues, and swing. Popular music offers “the one outstanding contribution which America has made to twentieth-century music,” and of particular importance in this contribution are “jazz and swing” (used more or less synonymously) (McKinney and Anderson 1940: 854). In 1941, Paul Henry Lang’s influential Music in Western Civilization also discussed American music, but the subject receives barely six pages out of 1,100 and in a chapter entitled “Peripheries of Nineteenth-Century Music” (Lang 1941: 933–88). And in the same year a book on teaching music in high schools warned against incorporating jazz into the curriculum, for “Swing music … is primarily physical. … To use such music in the school as a substitute for serious music is to cheat youth of a highly important experience which has the possibility of assisting in the development of spiritual resources” (Dykema and Gehrkens 1941: 455).
In addition to scholarly histories and textbooks two types of popular writing about jazz began to appear in the late 1930s and early 1940s: books and articles by amateur enthusiasts of the music, who wished to proselytize about their passion, and books or articles containing interviews with performing musicians. The new magazine Down Beat helped provide a forum for these discussions as well as to historicize the music. Two controversies added to the sense of “style periods” and the perception of historical depth in jazz in the late 1930s and in the 1940s. First there were those who felt that the popularity of swing indicated a dilution in the immediacy and authenticity of the music. They advocated a return to “traditional” jazz, namely the simultaneous improvisation and small-group sound of the New Orleans style that had marked the music of the 1920s. The second was the controversy over bebop.
In the early 1940s, just as jazz, in the form of swing, reached unprecedented levels of popularity, a self-consciously intellectual, antipopulist movement known as bebop began to alienate audiences. Harry Henderson and Sam Shaw reported in Collier’s in 1948 that dance-hall managers decried the new music for “killing the goose that laid the golden egg” (quoted in Porter 1997: 173).
Bebop was deliberately demanding. “You have to be an extremely accomplished musician to attempt bop,” wrote one critic (quoted in Porter 1997: 174). Another asserted, “It’s a difficult music to play and understand. That’s why our young musicians, better schooled than yesterday’s swing men, are turning to it once they find that swing is a pushover” (Bill Gottlieb in the New York Herald Tribune, quoted in Porter 1997: 176). Looking back on the bebop era from many years later, Dizzy Gillespie, one of its major figures, wrote in 1979:
For a generation of Americans and young people around the world, who reached maturity during the 1940s, bebop symbolized a rebellion against the rigidities of the old order, an outcry for change in almost every field, especially in music. The bopper wanted to impress the world with a new stamp, the uniquely modern design of a new generation coming of age.
(quoted in Walser 1999: 170)
Gillespie was also quoted (by Stephanie Barber, in an unpublished interview in 1987) defining bop as follows: “It’s variations on a theme never stated.” As a symbol of its intellectual content, boppers borrowed licks and chords from contemporary classical composers, especially Stravinsky, who was then living in Los Angeles (Porter 1997: 179–80).
The arguments over bebop continued throughout the decade. Louis Armstrong, by then one of the best-known and most respected figures in jazz, was quoted and (according to him) misquoted on both sides of the issue: “Don’t you know I’m crazy about that ‘Re Bop’ stuff?”; “Mistakes – that’s all bebop is”; “It’s all just flash” (quoted in Porter 1997: 182, 184, 185).
By 1948, Armstrong said that he was tired of the controversy: “They’re always misquotin’ me so I don’t like to discuss it no more” (Porter 1997: 185). However, in 1953 Armstrong was still speaking out against bop. In a newspaper interview he said, “It’s just one of those crazes that makes a big hit overnight and then fades right out of the picture. It’s crazy stuff – lots of discords and solo interpretation that just doesn’t make sense” (King 1953). Leonard Feather tried to explain the music in 1949 with Inside Be-bop, but it took a while for bop to become widely understood and acceptable. As late as 1953 Benny Goodman complained to the New York Times, “Maybe bop has done more to set music back for years than anything. Basically, it’s all wrong. It’s not even knowing the scales. The results have got to be bad. What you hear in bop is a lot of noise” (Firestone 1993: 354). It was natural that the old-timers were threatened by it. Somebody once asked Eubie Blake what bop was, and he answered, “Nothin’, man, nothin’ ” (quoted by Stephanie Barber in 1987 interview).
More discographies appeared in the 1940s. The Jazz Record Book of 1942 by Charles Smith et al. was a brief guide for collectors, but Orin Blackstone’s comprehensive Index to Jazz was published in four volumes from 1945 to 1948. Also in 1948, Delaunay’s discography was revised, edited by Walter Schaap and George Avakian, and significantly expanded, as the New Hot Discography. The following year, the first volume was published of a complete alphabetical discography, compiled, again, by Europeans. English jazz enthusiasts Dave Carey and Albert McCarthy were so thorough with their Directory of Recorded Jazz that they could only publish a few letters at a time. It took them eight years and six volumes to get to “L,” by which time the publishers gave up on them.
Jazz education took an important step in the 1940s, when Robert Goffin, the author of Aux frontières du jazz and an enthusiastic supporter of the music, and the writer and critic Leonard Feather gave a 15-part lecture series on jazz at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1942 (Feather 1996: 722–38), and jazz writer Rudi Blesh (jazz critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and later for the New York Herald Tribune) gave a series of lectures at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1943 (Hasse and Kernfeld 2002).
In 1943 Esquire magazine began featuring a poll, in which a panel of experts voted for an “all-star” group of jazz musicians. The resulting band played at the first jazz concert ever given at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on January 18, 1944 (Feather 1996: 728). As the 1940s continued, more and more writing on jazz appeared in the popular press, and the arguments about swing versus traditional and bebop versus swing became more and more heated. Phrases such as “real jazz,” “real American jazz music,” and “true cultural values” were set against “nonsense,” “damage,” and “flashy virtuosity”; “phonies” were trying to “pervert” jazz, “professional vipers” such as Dizzy Gillespie were aiming to “cut the heart out of the real main line jazz” (Carter Winter in “An open letter to Fred Robbins” in The Jazz Record 50 (November 1946): 12), and “fascists” were frustrated at their “inability to foist their idiotic views on the public” (Leonard Feather in Metronome 61 (September 1945): 16), Goffin continued his criticism of saccharine jazz and Paul Whiteman-style playing in Jazz: From the Congo to the Metropolitan (1944) but praised Benny Goodman’s band, named true jazz “the real music of America” (Goffin 1944: 240), and called for jazz to be taught in conservatories, and jazz archives to be established. Rudi Blesh published his history of jazz, Shining Trumpets, in 1946. In it he analyzed those traits of jazz that he believed to be direct descendants of African music and told the history of the music. But even this book helped to perpetuate the jazz wars, for Blesh praises the “authenticity” of the music of the 1920s over the “commercialism” of swing, which he condemns as “the music of defeat,” “salon music,” “not jazz,” “reactionary,” “anti-jazz,” “nihilistic,” “destructive,” and “rabble-rousing” (Blesh 1946: 262, 266, 270, 289–91). Also in 1946 the brilliant and argumentative Winthrop Sargeant, who was music critic for the New Yorker for 25 years, from 1947 to 1972, and wrote about both classical music and jazz, published a revised edition of his book Jazz, Hot and Hybrid (which had first appeared eight years earlier) (Smith 1986). Before becoming a music critic Sargeant had played violin in the New York Symphony.
In his book Sargeant severely criticized jazz for its limitations and praised it for its vitality. On the one hand he called jazz a kind of folk music that was not susceptible to the kind of analysis commentators often deployed for it; its creators were humble and uneducated and depended upon “impulse” and “instinct”; the music was primitive, formulaic, and limited: “in poetic resources it is about as rich as pidgin English.” On the other hand Sargeant delighted in the “excitement” of jazz: “Melodically, jazz is often strikingly beautiful and original”; “It has the quality of vitality that characterizes music designed to fill a real and thirsty demand”; “There can be no doubt that the world is richer for it” (Gottlieb 1996: 763–73). Racism and reverse racism were not far below the surface (and sometimes on the surface) of many of these debates about the qualities of jazz. The Esquire poll came in for its share of criticism on both sides. And the black-owned trade magazine Music Dial directly addressed topics such as discrimination in hiring practices and racism in the musicians’ union (Tucker 2002).
In 1947 the writer and commentator Ralph de Toledano published a collection of essays about jazz that had appeared in Downbeat, Swing Music, Saturday Evening Post, and Fortune, through which he wished to demonstrate the history and importance of jazz. The collection was called Frontiers of Jazz and the articles focus on the roots and early inventors of the music and trace its gradual growth through the decades. In 1948 the prolific bandleader and banjoist Eddie Condon published his memoirs, which are full of entertaining stories about jazz musicians.
In the late 1940s ambivalent feelings about jazz in general were still in evidence among traditional scholars. In 1947 Marion Bauer, who had written so scathingly about jazz in the 1920s (see above), was now a professor of music at New York University. In a revised edition of her book Twentieth Century Music, her own deprecating attitude towards jazz was abundantly clear. Although she obviously felt obliged to consider the phenomenon in her book, her chapter on “Jazz and American Music” began with the following sentence: “Jazz, for better or for worse, is a twentieth century American product.” Other comments included the following: “Whether we like it or not, Europe considers jazz the one original contribution that American has made to modern music”; “[Jazz] has beaten its insidious rhythms into every corner of the globe” (Bauer 1947: 316–17). But in the same year, from January to October, author and lecturer Rudi Blesh presented a series of programs on jazz on the radio (Hasse and Kernfeld 2002).
Ambivalence about jazz was strongly evident in the book on American popular music by Sigmund Spaeth, prolific author, music critic, and journalist. In the same chapter of A History of Popular Music in America he described jazz in terms of its “distortion of the conventions of popular music,” “decadence,” “creativ[ity],” and “underlying aesthetic significance” (Spaeth 1948: 415, 421, 424). But the late 1940s also saw jazz become the focus of a scholarly article in the most prestigious American academic journal of musical analysis and musicological study. The Journal of the American Musicological Society in 1948 published Richard Waterman’s “ ‘Hot’ Rhythm in Negro Music,” which attempted to trace the influence of African rhythm on American folk music and jazz and contained transcriptions of West Indian songs and jazz solos. In the same year the Marxist scholar and critic Sidney Finkelstein published an articulate and passionate claim for the importance of jazz as the music of an oppressed people in his book Jazz: A People’s Music. He discusses blues and folk music, engages closely with the social and racial issues behind the music, and, in remarkably prescient passages, makes two important predictions for the future of jazz. First, he said, jazz would bring American music to a time “when the artificial distinction between ‘classical’ and ‘popular’ will disappear … and the only questions to be asked will be, is it good music or bad? Is it honest music or dishonest?” Second, he hoped that one day Americans would recognize jazz as “a prized cultural treasure” (Finkelstein 1948: 19–20). The first prediction is slowly being fulfilled, and in 1990 the United States Congress passed a resolution declaring jazz “a rare and valuable national American treasure.”
On the whole, however, as a study by Morroe Berger published in 1947 in Journal of Negro History showed, jazz was regarded with suspicion and distrust for the first four decades of its history. White (and a few black) ministers and educators were worried about its feeling of abandon and lack of restraint; classical musicians disliked it because it was played by musicians without formal training (cited in Stearns 1956: 309).
Significant and widespread public and intellectual acceptance of jazz both as a vital current presence on the American scene and as a phenomenon worthy of historical and musical analysis belongs to the 1950s. The now-famous Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University was founded in 1952 by Marshall Stearns, who was a professor of English literature but also taught jazz at New York University and at Hunter College. The Institute was established as a research center and an archive of jazz materials, including books, recordings, photographs, and jazz memorabilia. Another important archive of jazz was established in the cradle of jazz by William Russell in 1954: the Tulane University Archive of New Orleans Jazz, which numbers among its holdings an important collection of oral histories (Zager and Kernfeld 2002, Berger 2002).
The 1950s experienced an enormous upsurge in the number and quality of books and articles written on the subject of jazz. Guthrie Ramsay (2003) writes, “The growth of formal criticism – writing about jazz – supplied a crucial impetus for the elevation of the music’s status” (p. 121). Again a significant proportion of them were first published in Europe, by means of which English, French, and German writers helped to show Americans the importance of their music. Out of 13 surveys, stylistic studies, and histories of jazz published in the 1950s, six were published in Europe. The first survey, simply entitled Jazz, was published by Rex Harris in London in 1952, and Modern Jazz: A Survey of Developments since 1939 by Alun Morgan and Raymond Horricks (1956) also came out in London. Jazz surveys the music from the roots of jazz in West Africa, to “the great individualists” Armstrong, Bechet, and Morton, to swing (discussed in the chapter “American Commercial Exploitation”), to the influence of jazz on classical composers, and includes a chapter on jazz in England. Modern Jazz is beautifully written and contains sensitive and thorough discussions of performances and recordings as well as a chapter on jazz in England, Sweden, Germany, and France. Two books by French authors in the 1950s were translated into English: André Hodeir’s Hommes et problèmes du jazz (1954) appeared in New York two years later as Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence; and Jazz by André Francis appeared in French in 1958 and in English in 1960. Another small French book, which was not translated, was Lucien Malson’s Les maîtres du jazz (1952), which had chapters on the major figures of American jazz, including King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and others, and was influential in spreading the word on the continent about jazz – France’s “enfant adoptif.” Joachim-Ernst Berendt’s Das Jazzbuch: Entwicklung und Bedeutung der Jazzmusik (The Jazzbook: Development and Meaning of Jazz Music) was published in 1953, but did not arrive in the United States in English until 1962 as The New Jazz Book: A History and Guide. Ultimately this book was translated into 16 languages and is believed to have sold more than a million copies (Lindenmaier 2002).
Berendt, who was also a concert and festival organizer and record producer, wrote two other books about jazz in the 1950s, Jazz-optisch (1954) and Variationen über Jazz (1956), neither of which was translated into English. These books and others solidified the view of jazz as a subject worthy of historical study, as was appropriate for an art now entering its fifth decade. Barry Ulanov, who had written on both Mozart and Bing Crosby and Duke Ellington in the 1940s, but spent his career as an English professor and author of books on religion and psychology, published the extremely thorough A History of Jazz in America in 1952 and A Handbook of Jazz in 1957. In 1954 Louis Armstrong followed up his brief 1936 autobiography with more detailed reminiscences in Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans.
An important stage in the historicizing process was reached in 1955, when the jazz writers and music producers Orrin Keepnews and Bill Grauer, founders of the record label Riverside, published A Pictorial History of Jazz: People and Places from New Orleans to Modern Jazz, an invaluable photographic survey of jazz and its musicians from slave ships and Storyville (the red-light district of New Orleans) to the charmingly youthful André Previn, Gerry Mulligan, and heartthrob Chet Baker. But the book is more than a photographic record: it is arranged chronologically in chapters, each of which is opened by a thoughtful historical introduction, and the photos themselves are accompanied by lengthy informative captions.
Also published in 1955 was Nat Hentoff and Nat Shapiro’s Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya. This book is subtitled The Story of Jazz by the Men Who Made It. This was the first book of jazz history in which the story was told in the words of the musicians themselves. Contributors included Louis Armstrong, Hoagy Carmichael, Stan Getz, Freddie Greene, Bunk Johnson, Anita O’Day, Charlie Parker, Oscar Peterson, Billy Taylor, Fats Waller, and Lester Young.
One of the most active writers on jazz in the 1950s was the English-born Leonard Feather, who had taken part in the lecture series on jazz in New York in the 1940s. Feather was a composer and arranger and a prolific author, who published many books and numerous articles on jazz. His Encyclopedia of Jazz came out in 1955, The Encyclopedia Yearbook of Jazz in 1956, and The New Yearbook of Jazz in 1958. In 1957 he released an interesting new book on the elements that make jazz what it is, focusing on the instruments, the sounds, the performers, the types of combos and bands, the composers and arrangers, and the nature of improvisation (The Book of Jazz: A Guide to the Entire Field). It also includes an eloquent and heartfelt chapter on “Jazz and Race.”
It was the 1950s that produced an important American music history book that dealt seriously with the vernacular traditions of American music. Gilbert Chase’s (1955) America’s Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present brought the rich traditions of all kinds of performed music under the legitimate gaze of historians of American music and included discussions of spirituals, ragtime, American Indian traditions, popular song, folk music, Sousa marches, blues, and jazz. Chase denounced the “genteel” and “respectable” attitudes of the past and aimed to provide a picture of American music in all its pluralistic variety. Jazz was accorded a chapter of its own (“Jazz: Tradition and Transformation”), in which the history of jazz is sketched, from its “cradle” in New Orleans to swing. There is also a separate 15-page chapter on the blues. Chase clearly understood that jazz was central to America’s musical history and indeed one of its most characteristic forces. Chase placed a quotation from Anaïs Nin’s diary at the head of his chapter: “Jazz is the expression of America’s self, its sensual potency, its lyrical force.”
Literary writers on jazz in the 1950s included Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison. In 1939 Hughes had collaborated with the jazz pianist and composer James P. Johnson on an opera called De Organizer. The rhythms of jazz also influenced his 1951 Montage of a Dream Deferred – a book-length poem in five sections depicting the African-American urban experience using history, poetry, and music. In 1958 he made a recording with the Henry “Red” Allen band. Hughes also wrote a series of books for children about important black figures in American history, among which were two books about jazz and jazz musicians: The First Book of Jazz and Famous Negro Music Makers (both 1955). The latter includes chapters on Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong. The First Book of Jazz is beautifully written for children – lucid and informative, with history lightly woven into tales and a few easily assimilable chapters on elements such as improvisation and syncopation. And as part of his pedagogical work in jazz, in 1954 Hughes released an LP entitled The First Album of Jazz for Children. It was narrated by the author, who also supplied program notes, and it discussed the music from its beginnings to New Orleans, ragtime, and the blues through to Dizzy Gillespie and Lennie Tristano, with many recorded musical examples.
Ralph Ellison (1914–94) was a musician and student of jazz before he became a writer. He wrote widely and prolifically on jazz for more than 50 years, including profiles of famous musicians such as Charlie Parker, Jimmy Rushing, Charlie Christian, Mahalia Jackson; reviews of recordings; a homage to Ellington on his 70th birthday; and an analysis of how the blues contribute to the quality and tone of Richard Wright’s autobiographical Black Boy. His articles appeared in The Saturday Review, The Antioch Review, High Fidelity, and Esquire, among other places. Jazz and the processes of making jazz also permeate his fiction, as Robert O’Meally’s compilation of some of Ellison’s jazz writing shows. In both Invisible Man and Juneteenth, for example, blues and jazz musicians appear as guides and central figures. “My basic sense of artistic form is musical,” Ellison wrote in 1974 (Ellison 2001: ix). He also famously stated that the three American institutions were the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and jazz (p. xi). O’Meally writes that “Ellison is known by jazz scholars and aficionados as an original and incisive music critic whose specialty was jazz” and that taken together, his musical writings “are among the most eloquent works ever written about jazz” (Ellison 2001: x).
Audiences for jazz, both live and recorded, also grew markedly in the 1950s. “The audience for authentic jazz is enormous,” reported Howard Taubman in the New York Times of August 7, 1955. Clubs, such as those along 52nd Street in Manhattan, flourished; and record companies began to sign lucrative contracts with top jazz musicians such as Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis.
The personalities of jazz musicians began to reflect the times. Davis, for example, was regarded as an icon of cool in the 1950s. His elegant suits, his Ferrari, his big house, and his sprezzatura on the stage put him in the company of the beautiful people of the decade: Marlon Brando, James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, and Ava Gardner. In Europe he counted Juliette Greco and Jean Paul Sartre among his friends. He was the subject of feature articles in Time magazine (January 20, 1958) and Life International (August 11, 1958). Quincy Jones has said that Davis was “hip and cool … It was a way to be dignified and proud and individualistic” (Early 2001: 42).
1956 was a particularly productive year for published work on jazz. The Story of Jazz (1956) by Marshall Stearns was written under a Guggenheim Fellowship and became a widely used historical survey of jazz in the 1950s. It includes two important chapters on Afro-Cuban music and expressiveness in jazz, and a thoughtful and nuanced chapter on race. The mainstream Music Educators National Conference recognized jazz as an appropriate educational field for the first time in 1956. And starting in 1956 Leonard Bernstein began writing about jazz in popular magazines such as Vogue and producing television shows explaining the music to huge audiences. Distinguished writers and educators such as Billy Taylor illuminated the pages of journals and magazines with thoughtful discussions about the social and cultural implications of the music. Woody Woodward, who was a general manager for Pacific Jazz Enterprises, told the story of jazz and sketched the biographies of many jazz musicians (and compiled a discography of 10 thousand recordings) in his Jazz Americana of 1956.
Also in 1956 the pioneering work of jazz criticism by André Hodeir became available in English. André Hodeir’s Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence was thorough and serious. A performer, arranger, and composer, Hodeir applied the careful analysis that had until that time been reserved for classical music to jazz. His detailed discussion of Ellington’s 1940 recording “Concerto for Cootie” was perhaps the first technically adept analysis of a jazz performance, taking into account formal structure, phrase length, thematic variation, harmony, orchestration, timbre, tempo, rhythm, and expression, among many other considerations. Hodeir pronounced the work a “masterpiece.” The book was both comprehensive and sophisticated, containing a history of jazz from its beginnings to the new “cool” school as well as thoughtful discussions on harmony, melody, different rhythmic foundations, the phenomenon of swing feel, and insights into the incompatibility of jazz and classical music.
William Grossman and Jack Farrell published The Heart of Jazz in 1956, a wonderfully thorough and idiosyncratic view of the music, including chapters on the Christian element in New Orleans jazz; on the role of different instruments in the music; on Bunk Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton, and Kid Ory; on “Renaissance” jazz groups; on “Progress, Novelty, and Dave Brubeck,” “The Apostasy of Louis Armstrong,” and many other topics. Grossman was a professor at New York University and Farrell a writer who specialized in books and articles on steam locomotives and edited the Locomotive Quarterly. In the same year bandleader Eddie Condon brought out A Treasury of Jazz, a collection of articles by other writers on jazz, rescuing some from potential obscurity.
In the 1950s jazz came into its own as an academic subject on college campuses in and around New York. The files of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers contain a syllabus for a course in jazz history at New York University for 1950 given by Marshall Stearns (reproduced in Walser 1999: 195–9). (Guest lecturers included Edmond Hall, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, George Shearing, and Lennie Tristano.) Stearns also helped organize jazz courses at several other universities and colleges in the New York area during the 1950s (Walser 1999: 195–6). Rudi Blesh was hired to teach jazz history at Queens College of the City University of New York and later also at NYU (Hasse and Kernfeld 2002).
The curriculum of mainstream classical music history, however, was very slow to take jazz into its fold. One of the most influential books of music history, Donald Jay Grout’s A History of Western Music, whose first edition came out as the 1950s came to an end, devotes five lines to jazz (and two and a quarter pages to American music in general – out of 742).
In the 1950s jazz even showed up in the psychoanalytic literature. In three articles psychiatrists discussed jazz in terms of cultural conflict, theories of psychology, and, in terms of trombone playing, “the pleasure connected with … sublimated anality [which] is derived not only from a throwing off of super ego taboos, but also comes about through a sudden momentary release of the energy needed to repress the aggressive impulses” (see Miller 1958, Esman 1951, Margolis 1954).
In 1957 Nat Hentoff and Nat Shapiro followed up their first book featuring performers with a second, entitled The Jazz Makers, in which they presented written portraits of 21 musicians whom they felt were among the “significant enrichers of the jazz tradition.” David Ewen’s Panorama of American Popular Music contains three chapters on ragtime, the blues, Tin Pan Alley, and jazz. And in 1957 the New York Times reported on an appeal to the Vatican by the Italian Jazz Federation for an “authoritative Roman Catholic pronouncement” on the purity and religious feeling in jazz. The appeal came in response to a condemnation of jazz by a militant lay organization known as Catholic Action (quoted in Walser 1999: 238–9).
In the 1950s jazz became a secret weapon in the Cold War. The New York Times of November 6, 1955, reported on its front page: “America’s secret weapon is a blue note in a minor key.”2 In the late 1950s the Voice of America, which was beamed to countries in the Communist bloc, reached 80 million listeners with its jazz program, which was supposed to show the world that jazz symbolized American freedom, racial harmony, and individual achievement (Walser 1999: 240). As further evidence of this, the US State Department sponsored international tours of Louis Armstrong and his band. This did not stop the normally cautious Armstrong from speaking out strongly against segregation at home and even from canceling one of his tours. As President Eisenhower dithered over his decision to send federal troops to Arkansas to enforce civil rights, Armstrong, who was by now in his late fifties and one of the best-known black Americans in the world, pulled no punches in an interview with the New York Post in September of 1957:
Louis (Satchmo) Armstrong charged today that President Eisenhower was a “two-faced” man with “no guts” who was letting Gov. Faubus of Arkansas run the federal government. Explaining in Grand Forks, N.D., why he canceled a good-will trip to Russia, Armstrong said: “The people over there ask me what’s wrong with my country. What am I supposed to say?” He added, “It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country.”
(quoted in Walser 1999: 247)
The irony of asking a maligned minority to travel the world showing off the open-mindedness of American society was not lost on any of the traveling musicians.
The jazz tours began in 1956 with a band led by Dizzy Gillespie and continued over the next 20 years, featuring many of the American masters of jazz, including Gillespie, Armstrong, Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington (see Von Eschen 2005, and review by Dickstein 2005). (Ellington and his orchestra continued these exhausting worldwide trips until a few months before he died in 1974). The death of Stalin in 1953 had led to a slight warming of East–West relations and to a slight loosening of state censorship in the Soviet Union. Jazz bands tapped into an underground enthusiasm for the music behind the Iron Curtain. But American jazz musicians also traveled to many other countries around the world, including those in Africa, the Middle East, the Far East, Latin America, and South Asia. The summons by their government to represent their country abroad also represented a significant breakthrough in terms of the music’s acceptance at home.
In 1958 jazz critic Ralph Gleason published an anthology of articles about jazz entitled Jam Session. In it he printed a representative selection of published pieces on what he called the “jazz culture” – personalities and musicians, styles new and old, definitions of the music, and contemporary reportage – as well as poems, interviews with musicians, and a couple of new articles of his own on jazz poetry and the economics of jazz. The latter is particularly revealing of the burgeoning jazz business in the 1950s, and it is worth reproducing some of the results of his research. Gleason reports that at that time (1958) the number of record companies had expanded to include more “majors” and several dozen minors, that these were issuing 600 jazz LPs a year, that jazz represented 9 to 12 percent of the total retail market, and that the top jazz records would be featured “in every record store, right alongside Toscanini, Rosemary Clooney and Elvis Presley” (Gleason 1958: 268). Hundreds of radio programs and 75 magazines were featuring jazz or record reviews. Professional jazz musicians who could hardly live by their music in previous years could make a decent living from royalties from compositions, recordings, and radio play. Many could survive (at least in New York or Hollywood, the centers of recording) solely on the income they derived from recording dates, and others supplemented their income by playing in clubs, writing arrangements, and taking part in well-managed tours. (The Jazz at the Philharmonic tour, for example, paid high salaries and included travel in first class.) Gleason concluded “Jazz is big business today. There’s no denying it” (1958: 242, Owens 2002).
Gleason’s conclusion is supported by other data, suggesting that jazz, mostly undiluted by commercial elements, was now able to exist on its own terms. Some of the bebop players and members of the “cool school,” such as Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, and the Modern Jazz Quartet, were financially quite successful, and the bands of Ellington and Basie continued to make profits despite the high costs of travel and maintaining a large group of players. There were jazz clubs not only in New York but also in most major cities across the US. And jazz historian James Lincoln Collier estimates that “in the 1950s pure jazz had an audience that probably numbered millions” (Collier 2002).
One new phenomenon of the 1950s in America was the jazz festival.3 These included the Newport Jazz Festival and the Music Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts, where a distinguished jazz performing series was begun in 1955 (at the so-called Music Barn), featuring performers of the caliber of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie. Another important component of jazz in Lenox was the School of Jazz, which was directed by John Lewis every summer from 1957 to 1960 (see Yudkin 2006). This school featured a stellar roster of teachers that included Lewis and the other members of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Jimmy Giuffre, Bob Brookmeyer, Jim Hall, Dizzy Gillespie, Bill Evans, and Oscar Peterson, as well as lecturers on the history and styles of jazz and many other jazz topics. Important figures such as jazz educator David Baker, pianist and composer Ran Blake, and the iconoclastic duo Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman, were students at Lenox. Indeed it was at the Lenox School of Jazz in 1959 that Coleman first came to spectacular public attention. The foundation of this school and its brief flourishing (it ran into financial difficulties after four years) were important symbols of the rapidly increasing acceptance of jazz as a subject worthy of serious study.
The Newport Jazz Festival was first organized in 1954 by wealthy socialites Louis and Elaine Lorillard and directed by George Wein, who was then the owner of the Storyville Club in Boston. In that year it was held on the lawn of the Newport Casino and later in various locations around Newport. In 1956 the Festival was the occasion of a major boost for the sagging fortunes of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, when the audience went wild for a long saxophone solo in Ellington’s “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue.” In 1958 the festival was the subject of the film Jazz on a Summer’s Day, which shows the palpable excitement of the event and the new (and sometimes uncomfortable) association between the jazzers and the well-dressed, well-heeled, yachting and tennis crowd. The New York Jazz Festival was founded on Randall’s Island and the Monterey Jazz festival in Monterey, California in 1958, and the Playboy Jazz Festival in Chicago in 1959.4
Beginning in the 1950s, jazz was also featured at some classical music festivals or other arts festivals. In 1957, for example, Brandeis University commissioned six new jazz works for its Festival of the Arts (Hentoff and McCarthy 1959: 232). The significance of these festivals was that, unlike in most other venues – like nightclubs, dances, and shows – the audience was there primarily to listen to the music (Anon. 2002).
This new attitude is symbolized also by the popularity of jazz concerts in traditional concert halls, such as those at Carnegie Hall and other venues across the country. The Jazz at the Philharmonic band, whose changing personnel had begun playing in the Philharmonic Auditorium in Los Angeles, was by the mid-1950s touring to concert halls across the US and Canada as well as Europe, Australia, and Japan.
In the 1950s jazz made frequent appearances on television and movie screens as the subject of documentaries. Three-minute filmed performances by jazz players and singers, such as Count Basie, Nat “King” Cole, Red Nichols, George Shearing, Duke Ellington, and Sarah Vaughan were offered by the Snader Telescriptions Corporation to television stations across the country to be strung together as entire programs. In 1954 the movie Jazz Dance featured two dancers demonstrating dance steps to the playing of contemporary musicians. During the 1950s a Sunday afternoon television series on music, entitled Omnibus and written, narrated, and performed by Leonard Bernstein, was broadcast by CBS. The program “The World of Jazz” was aired on October 16, 1955. And in 1956 an LP with Bernstein, entitled What is Jazz? was released. It featured parts of the television broadcast soundtrack, appearances by Coleman Hawkins, Buck Clayton, Miles Davis, Red Garland, and John Coltrane, as well as part of a concert with the New York Philharmonic, Louis Armstrong’s Sextet, and Dave Brubeck’s Quartet. Bernstein’s missionary work for jazz had a very powerful influence among mainstream musical audiences in the 1950s (Chambers 1998, vol. 1: 238).
In 1956 CBS broadcast the documentary Music of the South, which explored the roots of jazz. A wonderful movie tribute to Louis Armstrong, Satchmo the Great (1957), features Louis Armstrong and his All Stars on tour in Europe and Africa and Armstrong playing “St. Louis Blues” with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein. From December 30, 1957 to January 7, 1959, CBS put on four one-hour “All Star Jazz Shows,” which squeezed in several groups playing for a few minutes each. A historic television program was taped in 1957, when Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie, Doc Cheatham, Thelonious Monk, and many others made The Sound of Jazz for CBS, in which they play in front of a small audience in an informal studio setting. Two important series on jazz were broadcast nationwide in 1958: The Subject is Jazz, which ran for 13 weeks on National Educational Television, and Art Ford’s Jazz Party (13 weeks, WNTA-TV). In 1959 Miles Davis was the subject of The Sound of Miles Davis, in which his sextet performed “So What,” from the album Kind of Blue, and Davis played three pieces from the album Miles Ahead with the Gil Evans orchestra. Also released in 1959 was the powerful Cry of Jazz, a movie about the black experience in America and its influence on the music (Smith, Ferko, Rye, Kernfeld, and Gabbard 2002).
Jazz also served as the basis for many film and television soundtracks in the 1950s. Teddy Buckner, Benny Carter, Ziggy Elman and others play the music for Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets (1950). Alex North wrote the jazz score for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Leith Stevens for The Glass Wall (1953) and The Wild One (1954), and Leonard Bernstein for On the Waterfront (1954) and The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). Well-known performers played or wrote scores for movies. French directors loved the American feel of jazz. Miles Davis improvised the soundtrack for Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1957), and John Lewis wrote the score (and the Modern Jazz Quartet played on the soundtrack) for Roger Vadim’s Sait-on jamais (also 1957). In 1958 the movie I Want to Live featured a Johnny Mandel score and Touch of Evil a menacing score by Henry Mancini. In 1959 jazz soundtracks for movies reached a climax, with John Lewis’s score for Odds against Tomorrow, Charles Mingus’s for Shadows, and Duke Ellington’s for Anatomy of a Murder. In the late 1950s television dramas also began to feature jazz themes and jazz soundtracks, particularly on detective or crime series. The trend started in 1957 with Pete Rugolo’s music for Richard Diamond, Private Detective. In 1958 Henry Mancini wrote the music for Peter Gunn, a crime series based in a jazz club. The background theme was nominated for an Emmy award, and the soundtrack album became a hit. These were followed by Count Basie’s theme for M Squad (1958), Elmer Bernstein’s score for Johnny Staccato (1959), and Mancini’s score for Mr. Lucky (1959) (Smith et al. 2002).
The 1950s also saw a considerable expansion in the amount and variety of jazz recordings. New record labels specializing in jazz, such as Prestige, New Jazz, Verve, Riverside, Pacific, Fantasy, and Contemporary, were founded; older jazz labels such as Clef, Savoy, and Blue Note flourished; and bigger labels like Columbia, Vanguard, and Atlantic began turning their attention to jazz or founding new jazz series, such as Vanguard’s Jazz Showcase. More discographies appeared to try to keep track of all these new records. Discographies of individual musicians began to appear, many of them published in Denmark. By the end of the decade discographies of Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Charlie Parker, and Jack Teagarden were available (Atkins 1982: 2). Delaunay once again weighed in with a new Hot discographie encyclopédique (1951–2), and Albert McCarthy produced a nearly 300-page volume of new recordings and reissues released in the year 1958 alone.
Towards the end of 1958 a new and serious magazine, The Jazz Review, was founded. It appeared monthly until the beginning of 1961 and was the means of distribution for a great deal of thoughtful writing about jazz. In the first issue Gunther Schuller, who was to become an influential jazz scholar, composer, and performer, presented a detailed analysis of a Sonny Rollins solo on record. The analysis evoked Mozart, Shakespeare, and Rembrandt, and made a passionate argument for the importance and power of jazz. Also for the first issue William Grossman wrote the first of what turned out to be a series of articles on jazz history. Other contributors included Lawrence Gushee, then working on his PhD at Yale and later a professor of musicology; Nat Hentoff, critic and writer, who was cofounder of the magazine, co-author of Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya, and associate editor of Down Beat; composer-arrangers Bill Russo and Quincy Jones; and saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. In 1958 the Ford Foundation provided a grant of $75,000 to Tulane University to study the history of jazz in New Orleans. And as another mark of the acceptance and financial viability of jazz, in 1958 the famous classical-music impresario Sol Hurok added Erroll Garner to his list of concert attractions (Hentoff and McCarthy 1999: 333). By 1958 even the New York Times regarded jazz as having achieved “respectability.” In an article entitled “Jazz Makes it up the River,” the Times conveyed the news that jazz’s “long voyage from New Orleans barrelhouse to public respectability [has] end[ed] in a triumph” (Hentoff and McCarthy 1999: 327).
By 1959 jazz had become sufficiently established in the mainstream of American intellectual life that several collections of essays were published undertaking to consider the music from an objective and contemplative viewpoint. Three important collections were published in that year. The first was an anthology of essays edited by Martin Williams, cofounder of The Jazz Review and jazz critic for the New York Times. Williams was to become known to generations of young students of jazz as the editor and compiler of the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, a multirecord selection of representative recordings of jazz through the ages. The 1959 anthology, entitled The Art of Jazz, brought together essays by most of the best-known scholars and critics of the time (including Marshall Stearns, André Hodeir, Lawrence Gushee, and Williams himself) on topics ranging from ragtime to the latest Hard Bop movement. The arrangement of the essays projects a historical overview. Also in 1959 a single-author collection by the lyrical and insightful jazz writer Whitney Balliett appeared. The Sound of Surprise contains 46 essays, three from the mid-1950s and the majority published in the New Yorker during the period 1957 to early 1959. Balliett’s writing is pure, original, and often revelatory. He homes in on important truths when he describes Ella Fitzgerald’s “clear, scrubbed voice” as “sometimes so finished that it takes on a blank perfection” (Balliett 1959: 72–3) or, in a piece on Miles Davis, speaks of the “remarkable distillation” of his playing, during which “what comes out of his horn miraculously seems the result of the instantaneous editing of a far more diffuse melodic line” (p. 128). The drummer Max Roach has “an intense, mosquitolike touch on his instrument” (p. 221); a new example of Third Stream music (music that mixed classical and jazz) was “a perfect, and totally unconvincing, tour de force” (p. 162). (See also Balliett 2003.) In the same year a third book of essays, simply entitled Jazz, was published by Nat Hentoff and Albert McCarthy, with contributions by a dozen authors, including Williams, Schuller, and Hentoff himself. Like the Williams collection, this one conveys historical perspective, as the articles range from “The Roots of Jazz” through “Boogie-Woogie,” “Chicago,” a thorough analysis of the style and materials of Ellington, to bebop, the re-emergence of traditional jazz, and a thoughtful essay on “Jazz at Mid-Century.” In this last piece Hentoff writes that in the late 1950s jazz has “achieved a depth and range of content … that does merit – and reward – serious attention. … never before has jazz had so large an international audience, and never before has so much been written about it throughout the world” (Hentoff and McCarthy 1999: 327).
Two other books were published in 1959 in London. One of them contained essays by both English and American writers. It was called These Jazzmen of Our Time (Horricks 1959) and it had chapters on Brubeck, Davis, Gil Evans, Monk, Mulligan, Rollins, and several other contemporary figures in jazz. Horricks wrote eight of the chapters himself. The other book did not make its way to the United States until the following year, but it was an important contribution to intelligent writing on jazz. The book was The Jazz Scene by Eric Hobsbawm under the pseudonym Francis Newton. This was a marvelously erudite and thoughtful encomium to the value and difference of jazz, written by one of Britain’s most distinguished historians.
Finally, in the 1950s, jazz became a metaphor for life, for a sense of the possible. Jazz was sexuality, freedom, individuality, courage, belief, feeling. Jazz was the emblem of the Beat poets, the symbol of the counterculture. And no one expressed this more forcefully than Norman Mailer, author of the World War II novel The Naked and the Dead (1948), editor of the intellectual magazine Dissent from its founding in 1954 until 1963, and cofounder of the iconic Village Voice in 1955. For Mailer jazz was a powerful symbol in a post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima age. In a 1957 essay Mailer used jazz as a representation of all that was “hip,” a symbol of “communication by art,” and lauded the music as a means to “open the limits of the possible for oneself,” for “to swing is to communicate … ” (Mailer 1959: 341, 354, 350).
NOTES
1 Goodman later appeared with orchestras all over the country, performing the Mozart, Weber, and Nielsen concertos, and works by other composers, including Copland and Hindemith, from whom he commissioned new concertos.
2 During the 1950s many aspects of American and European culture were used as propaganda. The English intellectual magazine Encounter, which began publication in 1953, was funded by the CIA. The CIA also provided funds in the same year to keep the (left-wing, anti-Communist) American journal Partisan Review afloat. The Eisenhower administration sent musicals (Oklahoma!), operas (Porgy and Bess), ballets, and art exhibits abroad to demonstrate the individuality and freedom of American composers and artists. Abstract painting was regarded as the ideal expression of American artistic autonomy. See Menand (2005).
3 Jazz festivals abroad had begun in the late 1940s, including in Australia and in Nice and Paris (all founded 1948).
4 Also in 1959 the International Jazz Jamboree Festival began in Warsaw.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Anon. (2002). Festivals. In Barry Kernfeld (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd edn (vol. 1, pp. 753–9). New York: Grove’s Dictionaries.
Armstrong, Louis. (1936/1993). Swing That Music. New York: Da Capo.
Armstrong, Louis. (1954). Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans. New York: New American Library.
Atkins, Jerry. (1982). Magnificent obsession: The discographers. Jazz Journal International (November-December), expanded in IAJRC Journal (Winter 1989–90). Available at <www.jazzdiscography.com/Essays/obsess.htm>.
Balliett, Whitney. (1959). The Sound of Surprise: 46 Pieces on Jazz. New York: Dutton.
Balliett, Whitney. (2003). Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz, 1954–2001. New York: St. Martin.
Bauer, Marion. (1947). Twentieth Century Music: How It Developed, How to Listen to It, revised edn. New York: Putnam.
Berendt, Joachim-Ernst. (1953). Das Jazzbuch: Entwicklung und Bedeutung der Jazzmusik. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. English translation (1962) The New Jazz Book: A History and Guide, trans. Dan Morgenstern. New York: Hill and Wang.
Berger, Edward. (2002). Institute of Jazz Studies. In Barry Kernfeld (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd edn (vol. 2, p. 326). New York: Grove’s Dictionaries.
Blackstone, Orin. (1945–8). Index to Jazz, 4 vols. Fairfax, VA: Record Changer.
Blesh, Rudi. (1946). Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz. New York: Knopf.
Carey, Dave and Albert J. McCarthy. (1955–63). The Directory of Recorded Jazz and Swing Music (including Gospel and Blues Records), 6 vols. Fordingbridge, UK: Delphic.
Chambers, Jack. (1998). Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis, 2 vols in one. New York: Da Capo.
Chase, Gilbert. (1955). America’s Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Collier, James Lincoln. (1988). The Reception of Jazz in America: A New View, I.S.A.M. Monographs 27. New York: Institute for Studies in American Music.
Collier, James Lincoln. (2002). Jazz (i), V, 8. In Barry Kernfeld (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd edn (vol. 2, p. 381). New York: Grove’s Dictionaries.
Condon, Eddie. (1948). We Called It Music. New York: Henry Holt.
Condon, Eddie and Richard Gehman (eds). (1956). Treasury of Jazz. New York: Greenwood.
Delaunay, Charles. (1936). Hot Discography. Paris: Corrêa.
Delaunay, Charles. (1948). New Hot Discography: The Standard Directory of Recorded Jazz, ed. Walter E. Schaap and George Avakian. New York: Criterion.
Delaunay, Charles with Kurt Mohr. (1951–52). Hot discographie encyclopédique, 3 vols. Fontenay-aux-Roses: Editions jazz disques.
De Toledano, Ralph. (1947). Frontiers of Jazz. New York: Oliver Durrell.
Dickstein, Morris. (2005). Diplomatic bands. The Times Literary Supplement (April 15): 22.
Duhamel, Georges. (1931). America the Menace: Scenes from the Life of the Future. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Dykema, Peter and Karl Gehrkens. (1941). The Teaching and Administration of High School Music. Boston: Birchard.
Early, Gerald (ed.). (2001). Miles Davis and American Culture. St Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press.
Ellison, Ralph. (2001). Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings, ed. Robert G. O’Meally. New York: Modern Library.
Esman, A. (1951). Jazz – a study in cultural conflict. American Imago 8: 219–26.
Ewen, David. (1959). Panorama of American Popular Music. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Feather, Leonard. (1949). Inside Be-bop. New York: Robbins.
Feather, Leonard. (1956). The Encyclopedia Yearbook of Jazz. New York: Horizon.
Feather, Leonard. (1957). The Book of Jazz: A Guide to the Entire Field. New York: Horizon.
Feather, Leonard. (1958). The New Yearbook of Jazz. New York: Horizon.
Feather, Leonard. (1987). The Jazz Years: Earwitness to an Era. New York: Da Capo.
Feather, Leonard. (1996). Goffin, Esquire and the Moldy Figs. In Robert Gottlieb (ed.), Reading Jazz (pp. 722–38). New York: Pantheon.
Finkelstein, Sidney. (1948). Jazz: A People’s Music. New York: Citadel.
Firestone, Ross. (1993). Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life and Times of Benny Goodman. New York: Norton.
Francis, André. (1960). Jazz, trans. Martin Williams. London: Grove.
Frank, Waldo. (1937). In the American Jungle (1925–1936). New York: Farrar and Rinehart.
Gleason, Ralph (ed.). (1958). Jam Session: An Anthology of Jazz. New York: Putnam.
Goffin, Robert. (1944/1975). Jazz: From the Congo to the Metropolitan, trans. Walter Schaap and Leonard Feather. New York: Da Capo.
Goodman, Benny and Irving Kolodin. (1939). The Kingdom of Swing. New York: Stackpole.
Gottlieb, Robert (ed.). (1996). Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now. New York: Pantheon.
Grossman, William L. and Jack W. Farrell. (1956). The Heart of Jazz. New York: New York University Press.
Grout, Donald Jay. (1960). A History of Western Music. New York: Norton.
Harris, Rex. (1952). Jazz. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Hasse, John Edward and Barry Kernfeld. (2002). Blesh, Rudi. In Barry Kernfeld (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd edn (vol. 1, pp. 238–9). New York: Grove’s Dictionaries.
Hentoff, Nat and Albert J. McCarthy (eds). (1959). Jazz. New York: Rinehart.
Hentoff, Nat and Nat Shapiro (eds). (1955). Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz by the Men Who Made It. New York: Rinehart.
Hitchcock, H. Wiley. (1986). Histories. In H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie (eds), The New Grove Dictionary of American Music (vol. 2, pp. 399–402). New York: Grove’s Dictionaries of Music.
Hitchcock, H. Wiley and Stanley Sadie (eds). (1986). The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, 4 vols. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hobsbawm, E. J. [as Francis Newton]. (1960). The Jazz Scene. New York: Monthly Review.
Hodeir, André. (1956). Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence, trans. David Noakes. New York: Grove.
Horricks, Raymond (ed.). (1959). These Jazzmen of Our Time. London: Gollancz.
Hughes, Langston. (1955). The First Book of Jazz. New York: Franklin Watts.
Hughes, Langston. (1955). Famous Negro Music Makers. New York: Dodd, Mead.
Kaufmann, Helen L. (1937). From Jehovah to Jazz: Music in America from Psalmody to the Present Day. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat.
Keepnews, Orrin, and Bill Grauer. (1955). A Pictorial History of Jazz: People and Places from New Orleans to Modern Jazz. New York: Crown.
King, Brian F. (1953). Bop on wane, blues back says exposition headliner. Springfield Sunday Republican September 27.
Kingsley, Walter. (1917). Whence comes jass? Facts from the great authority on the subject. New York Sun, August 5.
Lang, Paul Henry. (1941). Music in Western Civilization. New York: Norton.
Lindenmaier, H. L. (2002). Berendt, Joachim-Ernst. In Barry Kernfeld (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd edn (vol. 1, pp. 193–4). New York: Grove’s Dictionaries.
Mailer, Norman. (1959). The white negro: Superficial reflections on the hipster. In Advertisements for Myself (pp. 337–58). New York: Putnam.
Malson, Lucien. (1952). Les maîtres du jazz. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Margolis, N. (1954). A theory of the psychology of jazz. American Imago 11: 263–90.
Matthews, Ramona H. (1986). Howard, John Tasker. In H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie (eds), The New Grove Dictionary of American Music (vol. 2, pp. 344–5). New York: Grove’s Dictionaries of Music.
McCarthy, Albert J. (1958). Jazz Discography. London: Cassell.
McKinney, Howard and William Anderson. (1940). Music in History: the Evolution of an Art. New York: American Book Company.
Meltzer, David. (1993). Reading Jazz. San Francisco: Mercury.
Menand, Louis. (2005). Unpopular front: American art and the cold war. The New Yorker (October 17): 174–9.
Mendl, R. W. S. (1927). The Appeal of Jazz. London: Philip Allan.
Miller, Miles D. (1958). Jazz and aggression. In Robert Walser (ed.), Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History (234–39). New York: Oxford University Press.
Morgan, Alun and Raymond Horricks. (1956). Modern Jazz: A Survey of Developments since 1939. London: Gollancz.
Newsom, Jon and H. Wiley Hitchcock. (1986). Sonneck, Oscar G(eorge) T(heodore). In H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie (eds), The New Grove Dictionary of American Music (vol. 4, p. 262). New York: Grove’s Dictionaries of Music.
Osgood, Henry. (1926). So This Is Jazz. Boston: Little, Brown.
Owens, Thomas. (2002). Jazz at the Philharmonic. In Barry Kernfeld (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd edn (vol. 2, pp. 394–5). New York: Grove’s Dictionaries.
Panassié, Hugues. (1936). Hot Jazz: The Guide to Swing Music, trans. Lyle and Eleanor Dowling. New York: Witmark.
Pearson, Nathan W., Jr. (1994). Goin’ to Kansas City. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Porter, Lewis. (1997). Jazz, A Century of Change: Readings and New Essays. New York: Schirmer.
Ramsay, Guthrie P., Jr. (2003). Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schleman, Hilton. (1936). Rhythm on Record: A Complete Survey and Register of All the Principal Recorded Dance Music from 1906 to 1936, and a Who’s Who of the Artists Concerned in the Making. London: Melody Maker.
Shapiro, Nat and Nat Hentoff (eds). (1957). The Jazz Makers. New York: Grove.
Smith, Charles Edward et al. (1942). The Jazz Record Book. New York: Smith and Durrell.
Smith, Charles Edward and Fred Ramsey, Jr. (eds). (1939). Jazzmen: The Story of Hot Jazz Told in the Lives of the Men Who Created It. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Smith, Ernie, Josh Ferko, Howard Rye, Barry Kernfeld, and Krin Gabbard (2002). In Barry Kernfeld (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd edn (vol. 1, pp. 784–801). New York: Grove’s Dictionaries.
Smith, Patrick J. (1986). Sargeant, Winthrop. In H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie (eds), The New Grove Dictionary of American Music (vol. 4, p. 145). New York: Grove’s Dictionaries of Music.
Spaeth, Sigmund. (1948). A History of Popular Music in America. New York: Random House.
Stearns, Marshall W. (1956). The Story of Jazz. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tucker, Sherrie. (2002). Historiography. In Barry Kernfeld (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd edn (vol. 2, pp. 249–55). New York: Grove’s Dictionaries.
Ulanov, Barry. (1952). A History of Jazz in America. New York: Viking.
Ulanov, Barry. (1957). A Handbook of Jazz. New York: Viking.
Von Eschen, Penny M. (2005). Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Walser, Robert (ed.). (1999). Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History. New York: Oxford University Press.
Whiteman, Paul and Mary Margaret McBride. (1926). Jazz. New York: Sears.
Williams, Martin (ed.). (1959). The Art of Jazz: Essays on the Nature and Development of Jazz. New York: Oxford University Press.
Woodward, Woody. (1956). Jazz Americana: The Story of Jazz and All-Time Jazz Greats from Basin Street to Carnegie Hall. Los Angeles: Trend.
Yudkin, Jeremy. (2006). The Lenox School of Jazz: A Vital Chapter in the History of American Music and Race Relations. Lenox, MA: The Lenox Library Association.
Zager, Daniel and Barry Kernfeld. (2002). Stearns, Marshall W(inslow). In Barry Kernfeld (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd edn (vol. 3, p. 653). New York: Grove’s Dictionaries.