If you persist in believing that musical tastes are shaped by elites, you might consider it a mere fluke that a regional song style from the most marginalized population in American society somehow managed to change the course of global entertainment. But jazz did the exact same thing, and managed this world-conquering triumph during almost the same time period as the blues, at almost the same pace. Here again, scorned outsiders set the tempo for mainstream culture with music too hot to handle, at least at first. Powerful institutions, from Harvard to the Pulitzer Prize, eventually embraced it—but only after another lengthy cooling-off period.
The two idioms may often borrow from each other, but jazz and blues are essentially different in their inner dynamic. Jazz is an urban music that came out of the hustle and bustle of the most multicultural city in the Western world at the dawn of the twentieth century, New Orleans. The jazz idiom thrives in melting-pot situations, because it is outwardly focused and hungry for new sources of inspiration. The blues, in contrast, first emerged in the most isolated rural areas, and its aesthetic beauty has more to do with traditions and legacies preserved from the past. You can still hear the griots of Africa, those community storytellers and preservers of cultural lore, in the blues. These influences also reverberate in jazz, but with more of an Afrofuturist vibe, a greater receptiveness to the possibilities of synthesis and metamorphosis.
From its earliest days, jazz demonstrated a remarkable ability to devour and digest other performance styles, a trait that would distinguish it from all other folk arts. Jazz assimilated the syncopations of ragtime with such success that many listeners believed, at least at first, that the two styles were identical. Yet unlike the ragtime music of Scott Joplin, the rag-influenced jazz of New Orleans placed great emphasis on improvisation, on spur-of-the-moment alterations in the composition. Jazz artists were eventually evaluated on their skill in making these spontaneous changes, and though they would play the melody, they just as often played around with the melody, or abandoned it completely, in the free play of personal expression.
Jazz musicians also mastered the bent notes and twelve-bar structures of the blues. This may seem an obvious move until you realize that New Orleans jazz players somehow learned about the blues decades before their peers in New York and other major cities. Jelly Roll Morton claimed he heard blues in the Garden District of New Orleans while still a child, probably not long after the year 1900. And Buddy Bolden, often credited as the first jazz bandleader, may have been performing blues even before the turn of the century. Most music historians take this for granted, yet we ought to consider the anomaly of New Orleans embracing blues at a time when other urban musicians were blissfully unaware or openly scornful of this humble rural idiom.
Yet Bolden was just as willing to draw inspiration from religious music, which he heard while attending services at the Baptist church on Jackson and Franklin. “I know that he used to go to that church, but not for religion,” later explained Kid Ory, a trombonist who met Bolden around the year 1900. “He went there to get ideas on music. He’d hear these songs and would change them a little.” Ory also specified that trombones, trumpets, and even drums would sometimes join in with singers at church services—suggesting that influences between jazz and religious music went both ways. The first generation of jazz musicians, omnivorous in their tastes, mixed these ingredients with songs and styles they heard at dances, brass band parades, funerals, and picnics and other social events. In fact, many of them learned their trade in such settings. Yet they also drew from idioms rarely considered as part of the jazz tradition, whether songs performed in the New Orleans opera houses or the music of visiting ensembles from Latin America. From the start, the jazz idiom was built on transgressing musical boundaries.1
And other boundaries as well. The oldest original jazz song known to us is a nasty piece of work called “Funky Butt.” This song was Buddy Bolden’s trademark, but it could change each time it was played. Sometimes the words were lighthearted, at other times obscene. Depending on the circumstances, it might serve as comedy or insult or even political commentary. The authorities did not look kindly on such improvisations. “The police put you in jail if they heard you singing that song,” explained New Orleans clarinetist Sidney Bechet. He recalled hearing Bolden play it in person at one event: “Bolden started his theme song, people started singing, policemen began whipping heads.” Here again we find that a respected musical idiom of the current day originated on the fringes, infuriating power brokers with its audacity and even inciting violence. The next time you hear jazz in a concert hall, recall that its documented history began with an illegal and riot-provoking song.2
Jazz musicians took pride in their boldness, but already at this early stage they also wanted to entertain their audiences. So much respectability has been piled upon this music over the decades that we can easily lose sight of how jazz conquered the world through sheer joy and delight. Buddy Bolden never made records (or if he did, they haven’t survived), but firsthand accounts testify to his skill as a showman and a crowd-pleaser. In this regard, he set a pattern for the jazz stars who came after him.
By all rights, Louis Armstrong ought to be best remembered for his extraordinary recordings of the late 1920s and early 1930s, when he established a new gold standard for jazz on tracks such as “West End Blues,” “Potato Head Blues,” and “Heebie Jeebies,” among others. Armstrong constructed a whole new music vocabulary, inventing countless original phrases that musicians still imitate almost a century later, and turned the jazz genre into a true soloist’s idiom. Yet for the general public, Armstrong’s enormous fame had little to do with trumpet hijinks, and drew instead on his consummate skills as an entertainer and his charismatic personality—assets that ensured his crossover success in radio, movies, and (eventually) television. Some serious jazz fans perhaps dismiss Armstrong’s hit recordings “Hello Dolly!” and “What a Wonderful World” as commercial fluff, musical antics that don’t do justice to his artistry. Yet they miss the point: jazz from its inception wasn’t a respectable highbrow affair for knowledgeable insiders. It had more in common with an ecstatic religion that aimed to proselytize, a ritual that converted nonbelievers through rapture and enchantment. Armstrong’s heroics could never have changed the music world if he hadn’t delivered his personal beatitudes and exaltations to the masses in an environment of participative euphoria.
The same pattern recurs repeatedly in the evolution of jazz. Consider the case of Duke Ellington, the only innovator of the early decades of the idiom who could rival Armstrong’s impact and influence. Ellington is now considered an elite American composer, and his name is often mentioned alongside the paragons of the concert hall. He deserves this acclaim, and his greatest works invite comparisons with his contemporaries, such as Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Béla Bartók. I especially admire Ellington’s recordings from the late 1930s and early 1940s, which achieve a radiant balancing of form and content unsurpassed by other jazz composers. But here’s the most remarkable aspect of this period in his music: Ellington was also a celebrity entertainer during this same era, and one of the biggest-selling popular music stars in the world. We cannot give full credit to his mastery without factoring in this crowd-pleasing mass-market angle.
The same is true of the hottest bandleader of the late 1930s, Benny Goodman, a clarinetist who commissioned classical works from Copland and Bartók, yet also led the most popular dance orchestra of the period. Or consider the case of jazz star Woody Herman, whose band performed the debut of Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto at Carnegie Hall in March 1946, but a few months later served up lighthearted dance music in the Hollywood film New Orleans. Of course, not every jazz performer of that era collaborated with a famous European composer. Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, and other hit-parade bandleaders of the World War II years had different agendas that didn’t require the participation of a Hindemith or a Schoenberg, but they never wavered in their determination to maintain a high level of artistry while also pleasing audiences and selling records.
Yet we also must marvel at how much social protest, disruption, and irreverence got embedded into these entertaining songs. Benny Goodman used his preeminence as a pop culture hero to promote desegregation a full generation before Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. In 1935, his commercial success ushered in the Swing Era, setting off a stirring decade during which hot big-band jazz stayed at the forefront of popular music in America. The very next year, Goodman hired African American pianist Teddy Wilson for his trio—more than a decade before Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking down the color line in professional sports. Clarinetist Artie Shaw, Goodman’s biggest rival, hired vocalist Billie Holiday in 1938, and other jazz bandleaders, unwilling to be left behind as the jazz world embraced this new attitude of tolerance, followed suit with their own anti-segregation efforts.
In the context of American society, these were earthshaking moves. Popular music was the first important sphere in American society to desegregate, and superstar jazz musicians led the way. And they continued to play a key role in the desegregation battles at every step during the years ahead. In 1957, Louis Armstrong made headline news with his criticism of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s refusal to enforce school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas. The trumpeter’s words stung all the more because of his reputation as a happy-go-lucky entertainer who didn’t get involved in politics. Armstrong now faced an intense backlash—some critics even burned his records and called for a boycott of his concerts. But a week after Armstrong’s explosive interview, Eisenhower changed his policy and ordered the National Guard to intervene in Little Rock. We can’t, of course, assign Ike’s change of heart to the offhand comments of a jazz star, but the Chicago Defender wasn’t far off when it claimed that Armstrong’s words “had both the timing and the explosive effect of an H-bomb. They reverberated around the world.”3
All world-changing music styles, no matter how far outside the mainstream their origins, eventually achieve legitimization and respect. In most instances, this shift is not announced in newspaper headlines, but takes place gradually in the attitudes of audiences and the policies of institutions. In the case of jazz, the music itself both anticipated and accelerated the shift. Even before the general public embraced jazz as a kind of art music, the musicians nurtured grand ambitions. An experimental, almost avant-garde sensibility emerged in the jazz world at an early stage, and never left it—you can still hear it in the genre today—despite an ecosystem that turned musicians into workaday commercial entertainers. We see this in the bifurcated career of cornetist Bix Beiderbecke (1903–1931), who could delight dancers with his sweet-toned solos, but also compose piano music in a prickly, neo-modernist style. We encounter a similar paradox in the saxophone work of Coleman Hawkins (1904–1969), who could achieve a jukebox hit with “Body and Soul,” yet simultaneously push ahead the harmonic frontiers of the jazz idiom. Or consider the case of Art Tatum (1909–1956), whose musical roots lay in ragtime, blues, boogie, Harlem stride piano, and Tin Pan Alley tunes—but his improvisations were so virtuosic and extravagant that they invited comparisons with the iconic masters of classical keyboard music.
Two figures stand out in this history of jazz straddling popular entertainment and art song ambitions: Duke Ellington and George Gershwin. If Benny Goodman sought legitimization by hiring Aaron Copland—“I paid two thousand dollars and that’s real money,” the clarinetist later boasted—Ellington and Gershwin aimed to prove they were on the same level as the ‘serious’ composers of their day. Ellington, perhaps more than any other figure from the early days of jazz, anticipated with almost telepathic clarity the eventual destiny of this new style of popular music. He understood that jazz would gain widespread acceptance as art music, and wouldn’t have to give up its commitment to swing and spontaneity as part of the bargain. In fact, the peculiar path of jazz to respectability required it to maintain its own core values, holding onto the blues, syncopation, hot solos, and all the other calling cards of its craft.4
Yet Ellington was perhaps cursed for seeing this destiny before the rest of society. When he introduced his most ambitious extended work, the almost one-hour-long kaleidoscopic tone poem Black, Brown and Beige, at Carnegie Hall in 1943, he was rewarded with sharp-tongued, unsympathetic responses from both inside and outside the jazz community. John Hammond, an influential advocate of black music, attacked Ellington in print for abandoning jazz, and composer Paul Bowles chimed in with a diatribe that dismissed not only Black, Brown and Beige, but all attempts to transform jazz into art music. A host of other critics called out the work as confused, fulsome, self-conscious, even corny. Of course, the consensus view today is that Black, Brown and Beige is a masterpiece of American music. But at the time, these criticisms stung. Ellington, for his part, stopped performing the work in its entirety, and never again attempted an extended piece on this scale. We are fortunate that this setback did not place a heavy burden on his confidence or genius—Ellington hardly needed an hour-long time slot to perform a masterpiece, and was perfectly capable, or perhaps even uniquely qualified, to turn out extraordinary works of three or four minutes’ duration. Yet we can’t help wondering at the strange process of musical legitimization that honors these visionaries as true artists, but only decades after the fact—first punishing their attempts to rise above the status of mere entertainers. Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, and other preeminent black composers could see the eventual endpoint, and worked to accelerate the process, but society doesn’t allow any shortcuts for outsiders, whose rebirth as insiders almost always takes place over a period of decades, and sometimes long after they are dead.
George Gershwin presents an even stranger contradiction. He gained fame in his own abbreviated lifetime as a musical prestidigitator who fused jazz and classical idioms, yet he had a background in neither field. This son of Russian Jewish immigrants, born in 1898, dropped out of school at age fifteen to pursue a career in Tin Pan Alley, the name given to New York’s commercial song publishing industry, then centered on West Twenty-Eighth Street in Manhattan. Gershwin wrote his first hit in 1919, “Swanee,” a late-vintage minstrel tune that would become a trademark number for singer Al Jolson, and went on to compose around thirty Broadway shows and produce dozens of songs now considered classics of American popular music, often in collaboration with his lyricist brother Ira. Tin Pan Alley was already under the spell of black music during this era, even if the songwriters themselves were usually white. Hit songs such as Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (1911), Jerome Kern’s “Ol’ Man River” (1927), and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Star Dust” (1927), for example, drew on rag, spirituals, and jazz, respectively, for inspiration. But they were targeted at the mainstream American audience, which demanded catchy melodies, danceable rhythms, and memorable words. Gershwin’s skill in this musical marketplace was unsurpassed; he could easily have spent his entire career as a tunesmith, creating pop songs for the widest general public.
But an unusual commission from a bandleader—Paul Whiteman, who wanted to showcase an impressive work mixing jazz and classical influences at a February 1924 concert at New York’s Aeolian Hall—changed all this. The tremendous success eventually enjoyed by Rhapsody in Blue, the work Gershwin produced for this event, would transform our Tin Pan Alley songwriter into the hottest young classical composer in America. Gershwin seized on this opportunity to reinvent himself, pushing ahead with his follow-up orchestral showpieces An American in Paris and Concerto in F, and eventually staging the folk opera Porgy and Bess before his death in 1937. Yet the huge success of these works should not blind us to the fact that few other composers of the day had much commercial success following Gershwin’s crossover path. The symphony orchestras of the United States may have made an exception for George Gershwin, but they were hardly ready for symphonic jazz as a regular part of their mission. You might think that the canonization of Gershwin’s jazzy classical works would have opened the door for an entire generation of black jazz musicians to establish themselves as orchestral composers, but nothing of that sort took place. This is no knock against Gershwin, whose works deserve acclaim and enshrinement in the standard repertoire. But we ought to recognize the larger incongruity of the Jazz Age, the name now assigned to the era that produced Rhapsody in Blue. The emblematic figures of that period in the minds of the general public (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Paul Whiteman, George Gershwin) were often those who served as conduits for the jazz spirit to enter the mainstream, rather than actual jazz musicians themselves—the latter were still excluded from the highest rungs of fashionable society. This tense and unstable situation, underpinned by many socioeconomic fault lines, testified both to the power of early jazz, which the mass audience clearly craved, and to its outlaw status. And this outlaw status was more than just image: when the young and dissolute went to places where illegal activities took place (drinking during the Prohibition era, gambling, prostitution), they expected to hear real jazz, not Rhapsody in Blue.
Music historians should probe more deeply into Ellington’s apparent rivalry with Gershwin, a subject rarely addressed in scholarship on these figures. After the premiere of Porgy and Bess, Ellington offered up testy words to a journalist, asserting that Gershwin had pilfered key elements of his music from a hodgepodge of sources (“he borrowed from everyone from Liszt to Dickie Wells’ kazoo band”), and suggesting that his own ambitions were constrained by the demands of earning a living and pleasing audiences. After these comments appeared in print, Ellington disavowed them, but it’s an open question whether they misrepresented his views or just weren’t meant for public airing. Ellington occasionally recorded and performed Gershwin songs in subsequent years, although not very often, and quite likely without much enthusiasm. After Gershwin’s death, Ellington would make polite comments and observations about his rival, but politeness was always the Duke’s way of deflecting issues he preferred not to discuss in public. More revealing is clarinetist Barney Bigard’s claim that Ellington refused Gershwin’s proposal to collaborate on songs. As that anecdote suggests, the rivalry probably only went one way. By all indications, Gershwin had great reverence for Ellington, and learned from the bandleader’s example. And in all likelihood, this merely inflamed Ellington’s irritation, as the above comment about Gershwin’s borrowings implies. At the time of his death, Ellington was working on a quasi-operatic stage musical titled Queenie Pie—a project he had first conceived almost forty years earlier, back in the 1930s, and was now crafting as his final opus. I don’t think it’s going too far to say he was still stewing over Porgy and Bess, perhaps nurturing a grudge over Gershwin having staged an African American opera while Ellington was still playing in dance halls.5
As noted, Ellington’s politeness and propriety in public settings were legendary. When the Pulitzer board rejected its music jury’s recommendation that Ellington receive the honor in 1965, the bandleader’s measured comment was typical of this well-honed facade: “Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.” But the next generation of jazz innovators had tougher, edgier attitudes, and showed little interest in pleasing dancers on the ballroom floor or attracting nickels and dimes at the jukebox. The modern jazz movement of the 1940s openly embraced its outsider status. Tempos got faster—often too fast for comfortable dancing. Melodies and rhythms took on new complexity, and set in motion a separation between jazz and popular music that would widen in subsequent decades.6
The early leaders of bebop, the onomatopoeic label that would get attached to this sound, were embraced by the counterculture, not the mainstream. Saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and pianists Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell would never have the pleasure of watching one of their hit singles climb the charts. Instead, they reasserted jazz’s outlaw status at a time when the music had gone mainstream. And their very willingness to walk away from crossover acceptance served to accelerate the pace of experimentation and innovation in the idiom. The twenty years following the end of World War II thus marked both a tremendous burst of jazz creativity and a simultaneous withdrawal of the genre’s leading artists from popular culture. Jazz flourished as an art form despite—or perhaps because of—its shrinking audience. Even today, various lists of the jazz classics most cherished by serious fans are dominated by the artists whose careers peaked during the period from the late 1940s through the late 1960s, not just the beboppers but the next generation that they mentored, including Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and others.
This was a different path of legitimization, one that required no acquiescence from the ruling institutions of the music world. Eventually the institutions would follow along—in time, jazz would even be rebranded as “America’s classical music”—but that was late in the game, almost an after-effect. Miles Davis didn’t need an honorary degree to prove how dead serious he was about his art; nor did John Coltrane or Ornette Coleman or a host of other jazz icons who rose to the top of their craft during the second half of the twentieth century. Even when they embraced elements of popular culture, as, for example, Davis did with rock in his seminal Bitches Brew (1970), a certain prickly otherness pervaded the music. Bitches Brew sold half a million copies, a new milestone for Davis, but you would never have mistaken him for an entertainer. The three most famous aspects of his onstage demeanor were playing with his back to the audience, walking offstage mid-performance, and keeping a serious demeanor—rarely did he let even a hint of a smile appear on his face. Needless to say, no one dared ask to see his Juilliard transcript.
Perhaps I am conveying the idea that musical innovations of the twentieth century never came from white elites with institutional backing. That would be misleading. In fact, a whole flurry of subversive music-making arose from symphony orchestras and composers schooled in the traditions of Western concert hall music. And in some instances, these highbrow excursions managed to channel the same kind of raw energy propelling popular culture—for example, when audience members allegedly got out of control at the debut of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps in 1913, and at George Antheil’s Ballets suédois performance in 1923. (The latter tumult was even captured on film by Marcel L’Herbier, who may have actually incited the riot to create an appropriate scene for his movie L’Inhumaine.) Our schemas of music genre and social stratification would separate works such as “Funky Butt” and Le sacre du printemps into separate spheres, lowbrow and highbrow, that in theory have nothing to do with each other, but in practice, the zeal for subversion and transgression in twentieth-century culture would recognize no boundaries and cut across all traditional class lines. In a later chapter, we will look at the striking connections between rock performances and acts of ritual violence, yet even here, in the midst of the classical music world of the early twentieth century, we already see anticipations of Altamont and the Sex Pistols’ final concert at Winterland. Composers are increasingly viewed as provocateurs, and their music is now expected to disrupt and agitate.
In still another way, the classical music innovators of the twentieth century reveal a surprising resemblance to the originators of ragtime, jazz, and blues. We have already highlighted the importance of diaspora in the creation of new forms of musical expression, but previously we focused on the black diaspora—and in particular, on the supersized influence the descendants of African slaves exerted on modern popular music. Yet in classical music as well, political exiles and émigrés spearheaded the most progressive movements of the century. Arnold Schoenberg, a Vienna native, had to resettle in California after the rise of Nazism. Russian-born Igor Stravinsky spent most of his life in Switzerland, France, and the United States, and resided in Los Angeles for a longer period than in any other city. Paul Hindemith also relocated to the United States, as did Kurt Weill, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Béla Bartók, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Ernest Bloch, and many others. The circumstances varied in each case, and sometimes better opportunities in a new locale, rather than political oppression at home, motivated a move. But we do well to consider these migrations in a larger context, recalling that outsiders have always played a prominent role in classical music—for proof, you merely need to consider the popularity of Handel and Haydn in England, the successes of Chopin and Liszt in Paris, and the many other cases of itinerant or relocated artists. Perhaps someday, a scholar will undertake a statistical analysis of the masterworks of the Western concert hall tradition, and determine what percentage were composed or made their debut outside the geographical boundaries of the composer’s native land—it will certainly represent a significant portion of the classical repertoire. In the twentieth century, these strangers in a strange land gained special influence, and remind us that the mystique of the outsider is just as great whether we are considering academic music departments and concert halls or jazz nightclubs and blues juke joints.
Yet in another regard, modernist classical music diverged sharply from these popular idioms: namely, in its pathway to respectability. All successful outsiders in music eventually gain the luster of esteemed insiders, but in the case of classical music innovators of the twentieth century, this could now happen without any real mainstreaming of the compositional techniques involved. In the twelve-tone row music of Arnold Schoenberg and his followers, or the experiments of various composers with microtonal techniques, or even the radical silence of John Cage, we encounter something very unusual: movements gain acclaim and legitimization, often through the intervention of academic and grant-giving institutions, without ever crossing over into the broader culture. Black musical innovations gain respect in very different ways—notably by selling records, attracting fans, and getting imitated (and frequently ripped off) by various commercial interests. In both cases, the transgressive innovator eventually finds acceptance as an admired cultural hero, and each subversive movement and their leaders secure respectability and iconic status, but the paths they take on this journey could hardly be more different.
The winners of the Pulitzer Prize in music during the second half of the twentieth century exemplify the classical model: try to find the hit record in the bunch. It’s not there, and hardly by chance. More than any previous generation, these composers resisted assimilation. This is something new. Mozart and Haydn were crowd-pleasers. Even the fierce spirits of Romanticism, such as Beethoven, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky, eventually had their musical vocabulary taken over by pop culture, and sometimes their melodies have been ruthlessly pilfered and repackaged as radio hits. But that will never happen with Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and the vast majority of other academic composers of the post–World War II years. Perhaps this represents the height of subversion—What could be more radical than an innovation that can never be assimilated? Or perhaps it’s a kind of “end of history” moment in elite Western music.
What happens at the end of history? Well, as Friedrich Nietzsche would admonish us, with his theory of eternal recurrence, we have no choice but to return to the beginning. Relocation, recurrence, rebirth—these three forces seem to confront us at every turn as we grapple with the disruptive currents of classical music during the tumultuous twentieth century. It’s all too fitting that, at almost its midpoint, Olivier Messiaen followed up his seminal Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the end of time), first performed at a Nazi prison camp where the composer was in captivity, with works inspired by birdsong, the starting point for all music, according to Darwin. This shift from ends to beginnings propels many of the most provocative musical projects of this era, especially during the second half of the twentieth century. (And not just classical music: What is rap but a resurrection of the pure expressivity of monophonic chant? What is the EDM-driven rave but a return to the trance-inspiring rituals of prehistory?) And in such instances, the eternal recurrence frequently demands homage to Africa—acknowledged as the ultimate source of human migrations and mythologized as the ultimate root of roots music—whose contributions are now embedded in the DNA of concert music no less than of pop. Here, again, the narratives of black and white music converge, even in a sociocultural context marked by extraordinary measures to keep these two spheres separate and incommunicado.
When we turn our attention to the early masterworks of modernist agenda, both this African element and symbols of rebirth and recurrence already demand our attention. At the dawn of the 1920s, Darius Milhaud crafted his La création du monde (1923)—its very name (literally “the creation of the world”) signals a return to first premises—on the basis of African folklore. This remarkable work anticipated Rhapsody in Blue to an uncanny degree two years before the Aeolian Hall concert that marked the debut of Gershwin’s masterwork. Even earlier, in Le sacre du printemps (1913), Stravinksy built his modernist sound structures on evocations of ancient sacrificial and fertility rites. George Antheil served up his Sonata Sauvage (1922) and A Jazz Symphony (1925) at a time when European interest in jazz had become permeated with odd notions of primitivism and noble savages. These concepts haven’t worn well with the passing years, and in truth, the African and world music ingredients in these works were often overwhelmed by the onrushing currents of European experimentalism. The stratified music scene was still some distance away from a real dialogue between cultures in which both could be on an equal footing. But from an ideological standpoint, the agenda has already been laid out for our inspection at this early stage. We are clearly witnessing the first stirrings of the pan-global approach that has come to the forefront of all music, highbrow or lowbrow, in recent decades. Perhaps we just needed to reach the end of history—or at least conventional tonality—before we could accept these traditions on their own terms.
When that more vibrant dialogue finally started to take place, with Africanized musical structures mixing on almost equal terms with European elements in Western classical music, the turning point demanded both a new name and a new agenda of rebellion. It arrived on the scene in the guise of minimalism, marked by the ascendancy of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young in the 1960s and 1970s. These new rebels not only drew on vital non-Western traditions, but also forged a dynamic point of contact between forward-looking classical music and mass-market popular culture—finally on speaking terms again after a long period of almost total isolation. Listeners didn’t need to take a music appreciation class in order to trace lines of influence between these minimalist composers and the trendy currents in New Wave rock, funk, jazz, and disco. It jumped out at them in the music, with its insistent pulsations and vamp-styled patterns, ingredients that now seemed just as suitable for the dance hall as the concert hall. In the early 1970s, Philip Glass might have been labeled a classical composer and Brian Eno a rock musician, but that discrepancy simply pointed out how misleading such labels could be. They both participated in the zeitgeist. Terry Riley’s albums were kept in the classical music section of the record store, but anyone who actually listened to his oeuvre heard everything from South Asian influences to DJ-style tape loops. This music just couldn’t be pigeonholed. More to the point, minimalism represented a vital return to the musical values that predate the whole enterprise of Western classical composition, standing out with a populist celebration of rhythm and trance. And again we find our way back to the diaspora and the black underclass, here in the concert hall just as on the jukebox. It’s hardly a coincidence that Terry Riley could have made a living as a badass jazz pianist, or that the Philip Glass Ensemble deliberately emulated Duke Ellington’s band, or that La Monte Young initiated his music career by playing with Los Angeles jazz musicians, or that Steve Reich cited John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass album as a significant influence. Even as this music promised—and often delivered—sounds that were fresh and new, the old dialectic reasserted itself: the soundscape of the outsider (as in so many instances, African or African American) laying the groundwork for what would turn into the sanctioned, legitimized music of the symphony hall and opera house.
In truth, radical realignments of music during the late twentieth century almost always required, at least in some degree, an African or African American infusion of creativity—even experimental electronic music, which at first glance seems perhaps immune to national and racial markers. These new high-tech sounds may have originated in research laboratories and academic settings, but soon the key innovations were coming from funk, jazz, and soul artists and forward-looking DJs. Only a few months after the Minimoog synthesizer came to market, this exciting new black vibe could be heard on projects such Sun Ra’s My Brother the Wind (1970), Isaac Hayes’s soundtrack to Shaft (1971), and Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book (1972). Here was one area in which elitists did get assimilated, perhaps to their chagrin. The innovations of Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), a pioneer in integrating electronic sounds into classical compositions, reverberate in current-day dance music, ambient soundscapes, and the various chill-out genres whose names are legion. Stockhausen’s heirs range from Aphex Twin to Frank Zappa, and a full assessment of his influence on commercial music would encompass such disparate figures as the Beatles, Björk, David Bowie, Miles Davis, Pink Floyd, and Daft Punk. When reminded of his influence on some of these artists in a 1990s interview, Stockhausen complained about his acolytes’ “post-African repetitions,” and griped about musicians who aimed at achieving a “special effect in dancing bars, or wherever it is.” But it was too late; the classical music establishment had been bypassed in this matter. Even if some electronic music innovators disdained crossover success, others would bring their trademark sounds to the masses.7
With all due respect to these musical agitators, I must point out that jazz musicians had been experimenting with electric instruments, specifically the vibraphone and electric guitar, back when Stockhausen was still in swaddling clothes. Today, these instruments are considered everyday ingredients of mainstream music, but they were little more than novelties when Lionel Hampton started playing the vibraphone in 1930 or Charlie Christian recorded on electric guitar with the Benny Goodman Sextet in 1939. In this instance, black jazz musicians served as the legitimizers for the innovations of white technologists, an odd reversal of their traditional role—but soon to become standard operating procedure for new music gear.
Jazz bandleader Raymond Scott, a quirky composer whose works became best known as cartoon soundtracks, set up a tech company to create new electronic music systems in 1946, and his work from this period anticipates key elements of the musique concrète movement, which embraced a similar aesthetic in France during the post–World War II era. Yet Scott was a forgotten figure in his later years, and even today has only started to receive his due. In truth, he bears much of the blame for this. This innovator worked with an obsession for secrecy that bordered on paranoia. Under slightly different circumstances, his Electronium, a combined synthesizer and algorithmic composition tool, might have displaced the Moog and shaped the course of popular music. But even now, long after Scott’s death in 1994, the specifics of the technology are still very much a secret. Despite these self-imposed obstacles, his collaborations with disparate pop culture institutions, ranging from the Motown record label (which purchased an Electronium and even hired Scott as a technologist) to the Muppets, make clear that his innovations had the potential to move outside of academia and research facilities and enter the mainstream.
This same path of dissemination has been repeated with every subsequent innovation in music technology, from the plugged-in instruments of the jazz-rock fusion movement to the most up-to-date digital music tools of the current day. Commercial musicians, from jazz to hip-hop and all points in between, have turned into forces of mainstreaming and validation for the innovations of others. When Intel, the semiconductor powerhouse of Silicon Valley, hired will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas as its “Director of Creative Innovation” in 2011, many observers wondered what possible role a rapper and DJ could play in advancing a tech-driven agenda. But as we have already seen with Hampton and Christian, this kind of symbiosis has been going on for decades now, and any real history of technology in modern culture would have to address figures as disparate as Miles Davis, Sun Ra, and Grandmaster Flash—although none of them ever earned a STEM degree. The outsider becomes the source of a different pathway to legitimization.
At first glance, this trend seems to represent a total reversal of thousands of years of music history. But even as outsiders gained a certain kind of social power during the course of the twentieth century—call it coolness or hipness or street cred—they still operate within a larger socioeconomic context controlled and shaped by others. This situation creates a distinctive tension in modern music, which we will see manifested at different times and places in the closing chapters of this book. As a result, institutions and gatekeepers are increasingly conflicted over what gets included or excluded from any given setting.
So far in our narrative of twentieth-century music, white folks haven’t fared too well—at least not as self-sufficient pioneers who can make the transition from outside-the-box innovation to mainstream pop culture acceptance. And when we have encountered a visionary figure of this sort, such as George Gershwin or Benny Goodman, we’ve often found them drawing explicitly upon sources of inspiration from the black community. But modern music history offers one huge exception, and we need to address it now. We must wrangle with country music, which for almost a century has consistently ranked among the most popular genres in the United States, and long ago went global in its appeal. I still recall my shock as a young man, when a scholarship allowed me to leave behind the rough-and-tumble neighborhoods of my youth and study at Oxford University in faraway England. Here I uneasily adapted to a world and culture completely different from my American origins, but one thing was the same, very much to my surprise: even at Oxford, I heard country music—over and over again—and found it possessed a following and popularity that seemed incongruous in this elite setting. This was an unlikely success story, especially when I considered that the rural cowboy lifestyles that had defined this genre had almost disappeared even within the United States, making country a kind of anachronism in its country of origin. At that point in my life, I was immersed in my beloved jazz music, and playing piano to supplement my scholarship funds. I resented this rival export, which was hardly as authentic, or so I thought, as the more radical and disruptive music I favored. But nowadays, I’m not so sure about that way of differentiating music genres.
From another perspective, country music isn’t an exception at all from the processes we have traced in the evolution of black music. In truth, the vernacular black and white music styles of the South were never as far apart as their public images might suggest. Bluegrass banjo music may be branded as the ultimate hillbilly music (Hollywood certainly thinks so—just check out the soundtracks to Deliverance or The Beverly Hillbillies), but its syncopations are often identical to those found in ragtime. Country singers bend their notes just like the blues singers, and can even operate comfortably within the standard twelve-bar form. When the country star Jimmie Rodgers recorded with Louis Armstrong on a seminal track back in 1930, ignoring the segregated ways of mainstream society, no genre clash could be detected by discerning ears. But more to the point, if I needed a closing argument to prove my contention that music innovation inevitably comes from outsiders and marginalized communities, this down-home genre provides the clincher. How else can we explain the peculiar circumstance that even white culture needed to turn to its most impoverished communities and despised citizenry to find its emblematic sound? Here again, New York and Los Angeles and Chicago fell short. So-called hillbillies, cattle wranglers, and moonshiners took precedence over Harvard and Yale graduates. Once again, to go high, the first step was to go low.
Country music and blues share so many similarities in their origins, to an extent that can hardly be mere coincidence. They emerged at almost the same historical moment, and for the most part in the same down-and-out locales. In many instances, the very same record producers were responsible for their history-making early recordings—take, for example, Ralph Peer, who supervised the recording of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” the breakout hit that established the market for blues, and then organized the Bristol sessions, often praised as the “birthplace of country music,” launching the careers of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. For both genres, record labels had to mount field trips to the South to find their biggest stars, a humiliating admission for big-city music moguls who liked to think that aspiring artists should make the journey to them, not the other way around.
And consider the even odder conjunction of circumstances that brought both Jimmie Rodgers and Robert Johnson, the most iconic figures in early country music and early blues, respectively, into the exact same retail store in Jackson, Mississippi, to audition for the exact same person, H. C. Speir. Speir was the lowliest talent scout you could find in the music world of his day, a small-town operator who tried out unknown wannabes in the back room of his Farish Street retail store, and occasionally referred the more promising singers to those higher up the food chain in the record industry. To his later chagrin, Speir passed on Rodgers and told him to go back to Meridian, Mississippi, and work on his songwriting. But he did give the nod to Johnson, and helped launch the blues legend’s career. Yet what are the odds against these two genre-defining stars arriving at the same humble address in the same black neighborhood in the poorest state in the country during the Great Depression on their very different world-shaking trajectories?
No, this can’t be coincidence, but in its very unlikelihood we find a kind of statistical proof of the troublesome nature of musical innovation. Even after the rise of a powerful, global music industry built on the whiz-bang technologies of the modern era, the old dynamic was still in place. The insiders might very well run the wheels of commerce, but they had no choice but to rely on outsiders—and to do so over and over again—to keep them turning.