People who create jazz generally don’t write about it, and jazz records have a way of being remembered after theories about them are long forgotten. If there were no art, there would be no books about it. Writers are often only faintly aware of realities which the jazz musician knows but cannot describe.
Yet there is a legitimate task for the writer on jazz, as on any art. It is to bring understanding of the art to a greater number of people, and also to put the art itself into a perspective which the individual creator himself may not see.
This book attempts to tackle a problem which has been left unsolved ever since the beginning of jazz history. It is to place jazz as part of world music. The artificial distinction between “classical” and “popular,” “highbrow” and “low brow,” is ready for the ashcan. Jazz is the most important single body of music yet produced in America. But on the other hand, jazz is not helped by the exaggerated claims of some of its admirers, who consider it the “music of the future,” and find no other music worth knowing. Jazz must be studied for both its achievements and limitations. The first is necessary in order to break down the snobbery which still keeps jazz from being properly respected as a great music. The second is necessary in order to reveal the contradictions that still beset jazz, and to chart the road that it still has to travel. For jazz has a future as well as a past, and its surprises are by no means limited to its past history.
There exists a considerable literature about jazz, to all of which this book is greatly indebted. The first writing about jazz consisted of the listing of thousands of records, which had been issued mainly for a Negro public by companies that had no idea of their musical value. The names of the musicians who took part on these recordings were unearthed, and slowly a picture was formed of the outstanding men who had brought a new music into being. This collection of data was a magnificent piece of collective scholarship, although never called by that highfaluting name, and done by men whose main guide was their love for the music and keenness of ear. It required, moreover, close collaboration between the collectors and the musicians themselves. Critics abroad as well as at home took part in this research, and the classic compilation of record data is Charles Delaunay’s “Hot Discography,” although it is now rivaled by Orrin Blackstone’s “Index to Jazz.”
The French critic, Hugues Panassie, wrote the first analytic study of jazz to be widely read in America. Translated in 1936, as “Hot Jazz,” it provided the beginning student and collector with a guide to the bewildering wealth of material, and also gave the veteran collector many ideas to argue over. Today its theories no longer stand up. They were from the start attempts to find analytic words for what were only subjective impressions. Its great qualities, which still carry through today, were its genuine enthusiasm for the music, its willingness to point out some works as better than others, the fine ear for music of genuine stature that its author displayed.
“Jazzmen,” a collective historical study edited by Frederick Ramsey, Jr., and Charles Edward Smith, appeared in 1939, and carried the understanding of jazz a step forward. In this book, unlike Panassie’s, jazz appeared as the creation of an entire people more than of a few representative musicians. The authors were able to recreate in words a musical life, mainly of New Orleans, which was only faintly represented on records. Today there seems in the book to be too poetic a nostalgia thrown about the life of the Negro people in the South, and it is now apparent that the movement of the music North was not the great tragedy it appeared to be to the writers. This movement was a necessary forward step for jazz. But the book is still the best documentary history of the early days of jazz.
Winthrop Sargeant’s “Jazz, Hot and Hybrid,” appearing in 1938, brought to jazz the scrutiny of a professional music critic. Its weakness was that it tried to generalize, from a few selected records, some characteristics that were common to all. The author had no knowledge of the variety of moods and forms in the music, its origins and constantly changing content. Its study, however, of the chord structures, scale systems and rhythmic patterns of jazz were an improvement on Panassie’s definition of “hot style,” and still have value today.
Panassie’s second book, “The Real Jazz,” published in 1942, showed little advance over his first. In correcting the overemphasis of his first book on the work of the white musicians in Chicago, and evaluating the great achievements of the early Negro musicians, he fell into the error common among European critics of making a folk and a people’s art synonymous with the “primitive.” Thus he says, “In music, primitive man has generally greater talent than civilized man,” a foolish statement whether referring to jazz or to Beethoven. His tastes, so far as the progress of jazz was concerned, remained confined to the boundaries of ten years before, missing the boat on Basie and Lester Young.
“The Jazz Record Book,” by Charles Edward Smith assisted by Frederick Ramsey, Jr., Charles Payne Rogers and William Russell, also appeared in 1942. This book carried the approach of “Jazzmen” into record analysis. Its first 125 pages are an excellent compact history of the rise of jazz, thankfully lacking in primitivistic theories. The record criticisms are sharp and perceptive. The weakness of the book was that the authors limited themselves to the records actually in print at the time. Had the writers ignored the vagaries of record companies, and done what they can do so well—evaluate the main body of the recorded literature of New Orleans jazz and the blues—they would have expended less space on music they didn’t really like and provided a guide to collectors, students and record companies that would stand up today.
Robert Goffin’s “Jazz: From the Congo to the Metropolitan,” his second book but the first to appear in English, was published in 1944. He carried further the study of the background of jazz, making some interesting points about the reappearance of old French folk songs in jazz. He failed to develop this point further, however, falling instead into the “African,” “primitive” and “subconscious” theories of jazz. He looked on jazz almost as if it were another kind of aesthetic experiment such as took place in Paris in the 1920’s, one with dada, surrealism and automatic writing. He also gave jazz the left-handed compliment of lavishing praise upon it, and then saying that “music has no need of the intelligence.” The truth is that all art, and jazz is no exception, grows out of man’s ability to think as well as to feel.
“Shining Trumpets,” by Rudi Blesh, which appeared in 1946, carried the “folk,” “primitive” and “African” theory of jazz to its furthest extreme. Its most worthwhile quality was that it carried the exploration of the roots of jazz back into the blues and spirituals of the past century. But this music, while most important to jazz, is not identical with jazz. And in taking the further leap into Africa, seeing only similarities and no differences, Blesh transformed what might have been a valuable theory of the continuity of musical development into a dogmatic and abstract definition of jazz, which was a barrier to the understanding of the music and of the people who made it. Instead of seeing that jazz and American folk music has been continually changing, to Blesh there was no change of importance up to the 1920’s, and then a vast change which causes him to call all new jazz produced since, no matter how earnest its efforts to express new feelings and develop new techniques, a “commercial conspiracy.”
Theories concerning races and inheritance of “racial characteristics” are advanced in the name of science, although such theories have been discredited by most scientists. The attitude towards the Negro people is one of great sympathy, but deficient in understanding. The suffering of the Negro people was not so passive as he describes it, and the music was not so escapist. The Negro people struggled in the most realistic way against slavery, through revolts, the Underground Railroad, and their heroic role in the Civil War. They struggled in the most realistic way against all forms of discrimination and Jim Crowism that followed the Civil War. The music was a weapon in these struggles, and had the people not had the vitality to fight realistically for freedom, they would not have had the vitality to create this great music. As in the case of other similar theorists, the backward-looking approach to the music is bolstered by an attack on “civilized” music. Jazz, to Blesh, is sheer improvisation, and “with it Western music as we know it disappears and its composers, too.”
The present book is aimed at breaking down barriers. There is first the barrier between jazz and concert music, each considering itself a world apart, although each suffers from the lack of qualities that the other possesses. There is, as well, the narrow partisanship that has grown up within jazz itself, seen for example in the cultist atmosphere that has grown about both bebop and the New Orleans revival. This seeking in music for a fad is a sign of immaturity among jazz followers. People come before music. They fashion music to fit their needs, and discard it when they no longer need it. They have too many different needs of heart and mind to be satisfied by a single approach to musical form. Bebop has remarkable qualities, and the New Orleans revival reminds us of other beauties which have been lost. Neither supplies either musicians or audience with all that they have a right to ask of the art of music.
There is a partisanship needed today. It is a partisanship against the insincerity, the callous imitation and plagiarism of musical ideas, the misuse and destruction of human genius, that infest both the world of popular music and the concert world. The divisions that exist in both the popular and the concert musical world are only a sign of the fact that the musician of today does not have the opportunity to work out his problems in the most rational and productive manner. What we need to fight for is the conditions under which we can begin to solve these problems in the most real and practical way. This, as I will try to show, is a problem of American life as well as of American music.
The illustrative lists that follow the chapters dealing with the many styles and developments of jazz consist of records which at this writing are available for purchase. In addition I have tried to indicate the nature of the most important material now out of print, which should be made available again for study.
I am indebted to Irving Ravinsky, George Avakian, Alfred Lion, Grant Adams and Ross Russell for the opportunity to hear many records which I did not have.
SIDNEY FINKELSTEIN