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. In addition, three noteworthy books of serious musical criticism on jazz1 have been issued and several notable documentations of Negro folk music made. But the predicament is a pleasant one, since it does vindicate our title as a fair and honest assessment of the musical situation. This year Negro music has really gone to par.
The main reason lies perhaps in this central fact, attested by a number of serious documentary concerts of Negro folk music: that instead of being sentimentalized extravagantly, Negro music is being intellectualized seriously, soberly, and in some cases controversially. Just as the swing era has marked something of a reaction from the dilution and commercialization of the Tin Pan Alley period, so now the faddist interest in Negro music is deepening into technical analysis and criticism. The public taste may still be undiscriminating and fickle, but inner circles, both amateur and professional, are swiftly becoming critical and technically expert. It is, incidentally, high time for the Negro audience to become itself more seriously critical and expertly informed about its own music, which it has tended to take too much for granted all along. And it is more than high time, too, for some of our Negro musicians to have their say.
Personally, I am presenting no fanatical racialism on a subject that not only knows no color line, but has proved so convincingly that there is everything to be gained in vital collaboration between all who are seriously interested in the idioms and cause of Negro music. In fact, the testimony to Negro music which I shall review is perhaps all the stronger because it comes from racially outside, but spiritually inside, sources. Aside from the musical fraternalism involved, these enthusiastic white exponents and partisans of Negro music are symbols of the finest and most progressive trends in our present-day culture. They may even be harbingers of a finer future.
Winthrop Sargeant’s Jazz: Hot And Hybrid is the best and most scholarly analysis of jazz and Negro folk music to date; all the more welcome because it is objective in attitude and technical in approach. The Negro source influences are freely admitted and correctly traced, the important basic denominators of idioms common to the Negro’s religious and secular folk music are clearly seen, the periods of development are competently sketched with the possible exception of the post–Civil War period, where there is little documentation anyway; and most important of all, the musical idioms of modern jazz are carefully analyzed. The nonsense of expecting pure racial idioms is fortunately dispensed with in the frank realization that Negro music is inevitably composite, and should have borrowed, as well as indigenous, elements. The latter are carefully analyzed, with a general conclusion that jazz rhythm is basically Negro, so much so as to be in all probability derivative from Africa; that polyrhythm and group improvisation are its characteristic techniques, that the scalar structure of jazz, on the other hand, is composite and only specifically racial in regard to the tetratonic “blues scale,” and that the harmonic structure of American Negro jazz is the least racial of all the elements, although handled with distinctive color and freedom by the best jazz exponents.
Obviously this is a well-tempered analysis, highly illuminating and far from dogmatic since it gives ample musical annotations. I am particularly in agreement with the chapter on the Geography of Jazz Rhythm because it admits characteristic differences between European syncopation and polyrhythm and the dominant African and Afro-American varieties—a sensible solution of a vexatious controversial problem. We are also given profitable hints of differences between African and American Negro rhythm patterns—the one largely in triple measure and the other almost exclusively quadruple—hints which must be followed further in later intensive comparative studies. I suspect that they will definitely confirm my own view of the tango-habanera rhythm as the musical bridge between the Negro’s African and American musical expression and perhaps, too, as not only closer to the African idioms but as the missing clue to the persistent three over four polyrhythm back of the purest strains of Negro American folk songs. The absence of these rhythms in the Spirituals I have elsewhere already accounted for as due to the influence of the standard evangelical hymn measures, from which also the alien harmonic influences undoubtedly come.
Although I readily agree that “Jazz does not attempt to sound the profounder depths or human emotion, but gives a meaningful account of some of the shallows,” and would equally discount much of the faddist delusions and pretensions of the first decades of symphonic or classical jazz, I do not share Mr. Sargeant’s skepticism over the potential contributions of jazz and Negro folk music to music in the larger forms. Jazz does not need to remain, I contend, even “at its most complex” still “a very simple matter of incessantly repeated formulas,” or even, as is later hinted “most successful in the looser forms of ballet and opera, where music plays a subsidiary atmospheric role.” Mr. Sargeant recants a little when later he says: “The larger forms of jazz, if they are ever evolved, will be more likely to grow out of the jazz idiom itself.” Negro folk music, properly maturing, has the capacity to produce new musical forms as well as new musical idioms; that is indeed the task of the trained musician who has the sense and devotion to study seriously the folk music at its purest and deepest sources. To which Mr. Sargeant almost agrees by concluding: “It is meanwhile important to distinguish between jazz in its sophisticated metropolitan form and jazz as a deep-rooted Afro-American social phenomenon. On the one hand,” he continues, “we have the chatter and sales-talk of individual jazz artists and their press agents and hysterical admirers; on the other we have a much bigger and profounder thing—a new musical language growing from the cane-brakes and cotton fields of rural America, affecting every stratum of American society, a language certainly capable of expressing deeper matters than those which occupy the world of sophisticated entertainment.”
Wilder Hobson’s American Jazz Music is more of a jazz fan’s book, and to that extent less of an objective analysis or survey. However, unlike many of the jazz hobbyists, he is impartial and roots for no particular school. New Orleans, early and late, Chicago, and the various New York varieties of jazz, are given due credit and fair historical treatment, and an important point is made that in each period there was a great divide between the true jazz artists and the commercial exploiters, and that in many cases the real artists started the vogue and then yielded the stage and the dividends to the “organizers” and “stuntists.” So that back of many a headline name and reputation stands, as documented in a book like this, some relatively unknown arranger, some hapless troubadour of true inventive genius known to the real cognoscenti of jazz but scarcely to the layman, least of all to the “jitterbugs.”
And well documented, too, is the little-realized fact of the ceaseless change of style characterizing some of the greatest of the jazz artists, a sign of their restless creativeness and their skillful versatility. It is the commercial band that has the set style and the patented tricks; the real jazz artists preserve the simplicity and the spontaneity of the folk music which is their basic source and inspiration. Too numerous for exhaustive mention, we are lead through the cavalcade of genuine jazz masters: Scott Joplin, W. C. Handy, Nick La Rocca, King Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden, “Pee Wee” Russell, Bud Freeman, Sidney Bechet, Johnny Dodds, Louis Armstrong, Clarence Williams, Frank Teschmaker, Coleman Hawkins, down to the names known to today’s fans: Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Don Redman, Benny Carter, Jimmy Lunceford, Earl Hines, Count Basic, the late Chick Webb and many another. Perhaps the best of all of Mr. Hobson’s contributions is his annotated list of thirty records spanning the whole range of the jazz age, each a particularly representative sample of a given period or jazz style. As a list of “jazz classics,” this is one of the most carefully chosen and broadly representative of the whole lot—in itself a great service to the serious study of jazz and its deep underground connections with various folk music styles. Even a cursory review of it will convince anyone of the phenomenal and almost infinite variety of this music, a good part of which derives not merely from the inventive genius of the jazz composers but from the varied idiom of the folk styles themselves.
Important sociologically is the description of the typical jazz player’s life and lot. Behind the glamor of publicity, there is much hardship and injustice: witness the frank statement, “The inequality of opportunity for the Negro is nowhere more clearly marked than in this field where he is often so specially talented,” referring of course to the hardships, exploitation and discrimination rampant in the jazz entertainment world. “Commercial opportunities for the Negro musicians are, of course, relatively scarce, and the pay runs consistently below white levels and very often below scale. In this connection it may be noted that despite the large number of brilliant Negro instrumentalists, there are none regularly engaged as radio ‘house men’ or in the motion picture studio orchestras.”
These are frank statements of fact; a challenge to all those who truly love this music, for public opinion in the last analysis controls—and in too many cases, the public simply does not know the real facts. Much has yet to be done to raise the status of the jazz musician: the dazzling success of an outstanding few must not blind us to the real conditions. As a matter of fact, there is a direct connection between any economic improvement in this field and the artistic quality of the product. In this respect certainly the stock of Negro music is still below par.
It is for this reason that the shifting patronage from the dance hall, vaudeville stage and casual motion picture spot to the concert stage, the non-commercial recording societies, and occasionally goverment patronage as in the Library of Congress and the Department of the Interior’s music recording projects, represents something of great value and promise to the future of Negro folk music and the musicians whose art derives directly from it. They are thereby offered their first real opportunity to play and be heard as “artists.” Having survived by sheer luck in spite of commercial exploitation, they should now seize the hand of good management for the next step upwards.
Such, then, is the particular significance of the Carnegie Hall concert in December which, under John Hammond’s direction, assembled an historical sequence of authentic folk music played by relatively genuine, unspoiled folk musicians. There were slightly contaminating elements of “jitterbug exhibitionism” about this concert, and also of that hieratic snobbery too frequent with faddist patrons of rising causes, but in spite of all that, the concert was a high water mark in the annals of Negro music. Inspired by it, both the Hot Society Records Club and the Musi-Kraft Company made valuable recordings of most of the artists on the program; followed by the noteworthy album of Lead Belly folk ballads edited by Alan Lomax.
Mr. Sargeant pointed out in his book that only the phonograph could do justice to this music anyway: it represents both the way out for the folk musician to a more serious and discriminating audience, and the only proper medium for the careful perpetuation and comparative study of the rich provincial root sources of the Negro’s music. Combined with the increasing trend of field recording by scientific research projects, and with the government’s patronage of music record surveys, we may confidently predict that the folk music of the Negro has at last found a safe scientific haven after generations of perilous danger on unruly tides of popular whim and fad.
In my judgment an even more significant step was the Labor Stage concert arranged by Carleton Moss, John Velasco and Simon Rady, at which Negro music was dramatically presented in historical sequence from the far African past to the present, with a very exciting and convincing demonstration of its essential rhythmic unity. Of course, there have been many such “jungle to Harlem” presentations; the outstanding merit of this was its authentic, scholarly background, its carefully restrained artistry, and its welcome freedom from mawkish, sentimental racialism. Folk music needs a dramatic background for its truest appreciation; dance, costume, period setting are essential to its proper understanding. Eventually such a sequence as this must be carefully worked out, film-recorded and preserved in its integral character for posterity.
Notable, too, was the concert of the Mwalimu Festival Chorus, under the direction of Madame Manet Harrison Fowler, now one of the outstanding Negro choral groups in technical proficiency. In their African song cycle they presented a pioneer excursion into the important field of African folk music revived for the concert stage.
Benny Goodman’s “Twenty Years of Jazz” concert has not been mentioned in calendar sequence, because, to supplement it, he has a book about his own thirty-odd colorful years as a musician, called The Kingdom of Swing. “Pied Piper of Swing” that he is by his own confession, Goodman is nevertheless one of the great constructive forces in the jazz world. With an authentic boyhood apprenticeship in the field of jazz, a consuming love for it, high respect for the often unrecognized master artists in the field, and unprejudiced courage, he has really done as much and more for the artistic advance of this type of music as he has for the “jitterbug” craze. The favorable balance leaves us seriously his debtor.
Though casual and largely biographic, there is much for the student of Negro folk music in this volume; especially the documenting of the constant interchange between Negro and white jazz musicians long before the days of “mixed bands” and open public collaboration. As to the now notorious Carnegie Hall concert, half spoiled by an over-emotional audience, Goodman’s intentions were sound and constructive; and his critical praise of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, “Cootie” Williams, Lester Young, Walter Page—joined with his professional opinion of Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton—are authoritative enough for anyone who knows his jazz, or as the modernists will have it, his “swing.”
But lest, with all this happy behind-scenes friendship and this publicity inspired glamor of the “dukes,” “counts” and “earls” of the “swing kingdom,” we forget the serious reforms yet needed, I must end this section with a warning that popular music is often the artistic enemy of folk music; and that while good folk music can have popularity, (and should have increasingly), it yet has many bad and shabby imitations to fight and to contend with. The dance hall and the vaudeville stage are still friendly enemies—all the more dangerous because superficially friendly. An instance in point, it seems to me, was the public preference for the out-and-out caricaturish “Hot Mikado” to the wistfully subtle “Swing Mikado” of Harry Minturn and the Chicago Federal Theatre project. Allowing, as any good critic should, for the semi-amateur basis of the project unit, there was to the real music lover much more charm and artistry in the latter, especially in the interesting contrasts of the regular and the swing choruses and the semi-exotic character of the dances. Too often the public fits the Negro artist into a conventional groove and prefers him there in much the same way as Bourbon Southern prejudice likes the Negro “in his proper place.” It is not to the credit of an artist as great as “Bojangles” Robinson is or was, that he so inevitably finds and stays in that sort of groove, and apparently likes it. The majority of the New York critics wanted their Mikado straight or their Mikado piping “hot,” but I venture the critical opinion that artistically they went wrong, and that if the music critics had had their say, as they should have had, the verdict would have been reversed.
And now to a brief but important epilogue. In spite of the vitality and importance of folk music, the climax of any musical development is in the art forms and on the formal art level. That is why the real high-water marks of the Negro musical season are the increasing maturity and vogue of William Grant Still and of Marian Anderson. The former, about whom Miss Verna Arvey has done a finely-etched critical biography in the Fischer Bros. Contemporary American Composers series, is more and more taking his place as one of the most original and outstanding of the younger American composers. As his style matures the folk idiom crops out more and more, tempering his earlier, too intellectualized, ultra-modernistic style. “Rising Tide,” the prize World’s Fair Theme Song, hardly heard to advantage in the Perisphere against the raucous though celebrated commentator’s voice, is really a composition of representative merit and real American flavor. No doubt it will be recorded in a good full version so that music lovers can judge and enjoy it; as far as I can judge, it is in the vein of one of his most inspired and racially typical compositions: the Lenox Avenue Suite.
As to Miss Anderson, almost everyone, layman and professional alike, has called up his superlatives, and while I heartily agree, I have no desire to compete. Rather, then, let me repeat, with the vindicating emphasis of time, what I have already said, years back, about her art. It derives in the first instance from the purest strain of Negro folk music; that is to say, she learned early from the Spirituals and the atmosphere of that spiritual view of life, how to feel with deep simplicity and reverence, how to project with completely impersonal and absorbed power. As I see it, she has just carried this great artistic lesson to the world of sophisticated art-forms and the whole tradition of the art song from the early Italian to Sibelius, and the result is something spiritually as well as technically phenomenal.
It is, without detracting credit from her painstaking artistry and technical skill, the open secret of her genius, which makes it appropriate to associate her art as definitely with the traditions of the music of her people as with the great cosmopolitan tradition of the world music which she has also so obviously mastered. That is one reason why, with no jot of change, her art can really move an audience of over seventy thousand, many or most belonging to the musically unsophisticated, as effectively as the most select audience of seasoned and expertly critical music lovers. The memorable Easter Sunday concert of the Lincoln Memorial was, in more than a sociological sense, a triumph of Negro music.