It was Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington who established jazz in the mind of every serious music student as an important music in its own right, needing no “popular” qualifications. After his work became known, jazz became impossible to ignore. In its handling of instrumental sound, in its power of melody, in its rightness of harmony and interweaving of melodic lines, it met every specification of good music within its small scope, and made many products of the conservatories seem, by comparison, mechanical and bloodless. Jazz was music, and the fact that it was also music of dance and song, that it was of the people in idiom and form, only opened up new and challenging ideas as to how good music really came into being.
This does not mean that Ellington’s music was better than any jazz that had come before, or was even the best jazz of its time. It does not even mean that Ellington was wholly understood by those who praised him. Ellington’s music was not “better” than New Orleans music. It was good for Ellington’s time as New Orleans had been for its own time. Ellington used musical materials that were familiar to concert trained ears, making jazz music more listenable to them. These however do not account for his real quality. He even did some harm to jazz, although not of any permanent nature, by falling into the subtle self-deprecation, forced upon members of a minority people who rise in the commercial entertainment world. We have already seen this happening in some of Armstrong’s performances. Thus the “jungle” titles Ellington gave to some of his earlier works fostered a wrong characterization of both himself and jazz. The works so described were generally mixtures of blues and sweet, mountain folk song, like the beautiful “Echoes of the Jungle.” Ellington of course has fought his way out of this kind of publicity, and so a later blues work of his, very much like “Echoes of the Jungle,” is given the far more meaningful title, “Across the Track.”
Ellington’s work is in the main line of jazz. Comparisons of “better” or “worse,” between works of one period and those of another, are meaningless and confusing. The struggle in art is to remain good. The world moves, and art must change. The problem of the creative artist is to do for his own time, for his own audiences, what the best achievements of the past did for their own times. This means the avoidance of meaningless repetitions of old patterns that have served their purpose. It means a constant awareness of new human and musical problems and a struggle to solve them.
This is Ellington’s achievement. In his work all the elements of the old music may be found, but each completely changed, because it had to be changed. He may be called a kind of Haydn of jazz, reconstructing all the old materials of jazz in terms of the new sound demanded by his times, as Haydn brought together elements from folk song, comic opera, serenade and street music and infused them into the budding symphony.
His records, taken singly, are not obviously better than other single performances of the time. He produced, however, the most consistent stream of first-rate jazz over a period of more than fifteen years; and this was due to his ability to restore, in terms of the new conditions he had to face, something of the social character of New Orleans music. He gave jazz, in a limited way, a kind of permanent home, in which it could enjoy a degree of security and still continue to experiment. He provided, at least within the confines of his own band, an opportunity for communal music making, and on a higher technical level than had been possible in the past. At the same time, owning a keen musical curiosity and a deep personal integrity, he insisted on the right to change his music whenever he saw fit, regardless of commercial demands. It was an achievement for him to build up so phenomenal a band as he did, and hold its core together over so long a period of time. It was an achievement for him to avoid the morass of tin-pan-alley song plugging, or the blind alley of a successful “style” and remaining holed up in it. Thus he grew as a musician, and gave his fine, creative instrumentalists likewise a chance to grow.
Ellington’s accomplishment was to solve the problem of form and content for the large band. He did it not by trying to play a pure New Orleans blues and stomp music, rearranged for large band, as Henderson did, but by recreating all the elements of New Orleans music in new instrumental and harmonic terms. What emerged was a music that could be traced back to the old roots and yet sounded fresh and new. Many jazz commentators, noticing how different Ellington’s music sounded from the old jazz, concluded that he had made a complete break with it. The truth is the opposite. It was because he was faithful to the essential character of the old music that his music sounded different. Experiment is, itself, a characteristic of the old jazz. If present day Dixieland performances reproduce beautifully the actual sound of the old music, Ellington continues its defiance of set patterns, its constant welcoming and absorption of new ideas, its unpredictable twists and turns.
He made the large band, of three trumpets, three trombones, four or five reeds and a four-man rhythm section as flexible, subtle and strong a music instrument as the old seven piece band, capable of the most delicate shades of tone and the most blasting power. This was an achievement not of mechanical instrumental knowledge, but a knowledge of harmony, and mastery of the musical problem of the relation of harmony to instrumental timbre. What is unique in Ellington’s instrumental sense, compared to that of other large band arrangers, is his realization that instrumental timbre is itself a part of harmony, and harmony must be understood in terms of timbre. Such an appreciation of harmony takes into consideration not only the tones directly produced by the instruments, but also the overtones. These overtones, the faintly heard tones that mix with the struck tone to produce the characteristic color or timbre of an instrument, are real tones that have their place in the musical scale. Ellington built his chords on the understanding that when two or three instruments perform together, their overtones also combine, along with the notes directly played, and either strengthen or muddy the resulting harmony. In other words, a chord played by clarinet, trumpet and trombone together, as in “Mood Indigo,” is quite different from the same chord sounded on the piano. In “Mood Indigo” Ellington even added to his conscious musical thinking the microphone tone produced by the three combined instruments. Among his recent experiments in timbre has been the use of Kay Davis’ wordless singing, in “Minnehaha,” and “On a Turquoise Cloud.”
Ellington’s use of rich chord and sound effects has been assailed by jazz purists as imitating romantic or impressionist composed music. There is something laughable in their easy slinging about of names like Debussy, or Delius, as if comparison to such masters were insulting. There would be some point to the criticism if Ellington had merely borrowed from these composers, as is sometimes done by tin-pan-alley arrangers and song manufacturers. The proof of Ellington’s quality lies in the force of the music itself. It sounds exactly like no music written in Europe or anywhere else. It speaks a language of its own. It has been imitated, even by European composers, far more than it has imitated anybody. The real parallel is that Ellington was working independently, and within the harrowing limitations placed upon a band leader in the cut-throat, business entertainment world, upon problems similar to those being worked upon by European composers. His achievements in orchestral sound, timbre and harmonic relations, are an addition to musical knowledge.
Ellington created not only a new sound for the large band, but also a new idiom for it; an idiom drawn partly out of the blues, partly out of popular ballad. The blues are generally the familiar, basic twelve-bar blues, but harmonically more adventurous, adding new, “dissonant” intervals to the familiar, basic, blues chords, and new chromatic notes, but giving the improvising musician the same concentrated, emotional phrases, the same ability to build a musical structure out of them, the same freedom to soar without regard for traditional diatonic harmony, as in the past. In other words, Ellington preserved the harmonic character of the blues, but developed them melodically. What he did with the popular ballad idiom was just as right, and exactly the opposite. He dropped the melodic line, which was generally meaningless, and developed the diatonic and chromatic harmonies that had entered jazz with the popular ballad, creating his own far more sinuous and interesting melody.
The blues can be traced throughout Ellington’s music. They are sometimes over-sweet, as in “Bundle of Blues,” but also often wilder, accenting blue and non-diatonic notes more forcefully. Typical of Ellington’s use of the blues are the following, taken from most of his recording career: “The Mooche,” “Saratoga Swing,” “Baby When You Ain’t There,” “Clarinet Lament,” “Echoes of Harlem,” “Mobile Bay,” “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be,” “A Portrait of Bert Williams,” “Jack the Bear,” “Across the Track,” “Cotton Tail,” “Carnegie Blues” (from “Black, Brown and Beige”). These are an education in the manner in which the blues can be made the germ for the greatest variety of melodic patterns, each with its own mood.
New Orleans music, as I have shown, was not a pure blues music but boasted a variety of musical languages, achieving its finest music in an interplay of blues with one or another idiom, “hot” and “sweet.” This became a basic characteristic of Ellington’s music. “Black and Tan Fantasy” for example was based on a New Orleans tune much like Oliver’s “Chimes Blues” and “Canal Street Blues,” with a touch of Chopin’s funeral march. “East St. Louis Toodle-oo” is based on a minor-key lament like “St. James Infirmary” or Armstrong’s “Tight Like This.” He often used many of the sweeter and mountain-inspired folk songs, such as those which open “Rocky Mountain Blues,” “Big House Blues,” “Saturday Night Function,” “Echoes of the Jungle,” “Saratoga Swing.” He used chromatic, Spanish, mock-oriental and Cuban melodic lines, as in “Mood Indigo,” “Boy Meets Horn,” “The Mooche,” “Caravan,” “Rocking in Rhythm,” “Koko” and “Conga Brava,” playing these idioms in all cases against a straight blues.
Not only did Ellington preserve the melodic curve of the blues, but he also preserved the antiphonal, two-voiced character of the blues, so important in preventing their degeneration into over-sweetness. One rarely hears in his music a single, sustained, melodic line, or a simple, unbroken series of riffs. There is always the antiphony, the statement and answer, found in the interplay of the solo instrument against the full band, of one instrument in dialogue with another, of brass choir against reeds. Even when the solo instrument holds the scene for a series of choruses, its solo lines are of the two-voiced character. Bigard and Hodges are masters at this kind of blues line. Ellington’s style and method of construction are generally based on the antiphonal contrast, duet or “concerto” style, starting within the basic themes themselves and characterizing the entire performance.
This method has enabled Ellington to make the fullest use of the creative talents of his performers, allowing them to grow as individual masters of their instruments and as composers. Ellington’s music is fundamentally his own, shaped by his taste and musical thinking. Yet, within these bounds, the complete performance is a kind of collective creation restoring, within the narrow confines of a single band, the social character of New Orleans music. Other large bands depended heavily upon solo improvisations. The Duke, however, evolved a most subtle and inventive musical style, which could set the character of an entire performance, give the soloist short phrases upon which to improvise, and provide a most inventive harmonic and instrumental backing to bring out the best in the solo. The soloist finds complete freedom to develop the possibilities of his instrument, and his creative musical ideas. The performance is relaxed, the soloist only speaking when he has something to say.
Thus Ellington’s music has remained his own, and yet changed its character with the entrance or departure of outstanding soloists. The soloists profit by learning from one another, often taking off from another’s style and developing their own, as “Cootie” Williams absorbed Miley. There is a double line of development to the music, that of Ellington and that of the character brought by the outstanding instrumentalists. “Bubber” Miley’s growl and “wa-wa” tones on the early records, like “Black and Tan,” “Got Everything But You,” “Jubilee Stomp,” are legendary, as well as his poignant blues and minor key, melodic lines. Williams went even further in transforming this roughness into the most sensuous beauty, as in “Echoes of Harlem” or “Delta Mood” and expanding it to the full range of the instrument, as in “Concerto for Cootie.” Rex Stewart mixed together plunger, half-valve, muted tones, open-horn tones heavily blued, and the cloudy lower register, as in “Boy Meets Horn,” “Bragging in Brass,” “Mobile Bay” and “Dusk.”
When the clarinet tended to die out elsewhere as a major large band instrument, Ellington made a most consistently effective use of the instrument. He was aided, of course, by having a man like Barney Bigard, so deeply rooted in the blues idiom and yet so inventive in fresh melodic lines and so masterly in technique. Examples run through all of Ellington’s work, a few being “Saratoga Swing,” “Clarinet Lament,” “Jack the Bear,” the joyous small band “Caravan,” “Minuet in Blues,” “Mood Indigo.” With trombone men like “Tricky” Sam Nanton, exploiting the growl tones, Juan Tizol the sweetness and staccato sharpness of the valve trombone, Lawrence Brown playing a Teagarden-like gentle and lyrical line and tone, but always with an expressive burr, Ellington explored about everything that could be done with the instrument short of J. J. Johnson’s bebop style. Examples are “Ducky Wucky,” “Black and Tan Fantasy,” “Caravan” and “Bragging in Brass.” With Johnny Hodges he made a major instrument of the alto saxophone, and brought into being perhaps the finest body of alto sax music in the history of jazz. The fullest range of tone and timbre is exploited, from the blues of “The Mooche,” “Saratoga Swing,” “Dooji Wooji,” “Wanderlust,” “Things Ain’t What they Used to Be,” to the chromatic, ballad-like lyricism of “Warm Valley.” Hodges also created, with the exception of Bechet, and in a style of his own, probably the most beautiful soprano sax music on records. The work of Harry Carney, of course, on baritone sax, is legendary, and runs throughout Ellington’s recorded output, a fine example being the small-band “Caravan.” Ben Webster inspired some fine compositions using the tenor sax, such as “Conga Brava,” “Sepia Panorama,” “Just a Settin’ and a Rockin’” and the amazing “Cotton Tail.” With Sonny Greer on drums, Fred Guy on guitar and himself on piano, Wellman Braud and Jimmy Blanton on bass, Ellington had a masterly rhythm section of which he made prolific use. Braud’s slapping bass, unaided, cut through the orchestral sound with powerful effect, as in “Saturday Night Function” or “Beggar’s Blues.” Blanton developed a solo style of great tonal beauty and power, as in “Jack the Bear” and “Ko Ko.” Ellington’s piano is sustained and chordal rather than percussive, and melodic, and provides a most beautiful punctuation of a solo melodic line. Perhaps the most amazing rhythmic achievement, among many, is “Cotton Tail,” in which bass, piano and drums play a remarkable individual role, and at the climax the entire band beats out a brilliant two-rhythm pattern.
Ellington’s forms are simple in outline, yet fitting perfectly the demands of unity and variety. The form he most often uses may be described as A-B-A. “A” stands for the opening theme, which is actually a group of two or three melodies, and is antiphonal from the very first bars. It is repeated, but the repetition is interestingly varied, the statement the same but the solo answer different. “B” is a contrasting middle section, frequently the section where the blues enter, often treated as a series of solos or duets. Then “A” returns, but always on a new harmonic twist, a cadence or instrumental reply, rounding out the performance like the classical “coda.”
The old stomp, rag and slow-blues forms often return within this framework, although so changed that they are apparent only as the skeleton of the music. “Bragging in Brass,” for example, is a brilliant take-off on “Tiger Rag.” The riff is an important element in this form, and never repeated to the point of monotony. It sometimes forms the opening band phrases, answered by the solo instrument; sometimes the band accompaniment to the solos; sometimes the means through which the orchestra re-enters after a solo chorus. Some of the most interesting examples of the use of the riff are “East St. Louis Toodle-oo,” “Diminuendo in Blue,” “Good Gal Blues,” “Just a Settin’ and a Rockin’,” “Concerto for Cootie.” An important factor in the Duke’s progress has been the experimentation often carried on in smaller band units. Some of his most beautiful records are those made under the names of his bandsmen, such as Barney Bigard, “Cootie” Williams, Rex Stewart, and Sonny Greer. In these records his new musical ideas are distilled down to the smallest group of instrumentalists that can handle them, often resembling the old New Orleans combinations. During the period when the sweeter, more “symphonic” records were considered the hall-mark of his style, the Duke addressed these hotter, small-group records to a more knowing, proletarian audience.
Although the records employing singers and popular songs are among the less interesting, even these have great distinction compared to the work of the other, song-plugging bands of the time. The vocal sections are not merely a sung chorus, but part of a vocal-instrumental form that has a beginning, middle and end, and an interesting, constantly changing timbre. More often the Duke has made up his own songs, replacing the over-sweet, harmonically confined, tin-pan-alley ballad with a chromatic and sinuously moving melodic line; and he has made this kind of melodic line the basis as well for a number of large-band compositions. Frequently this diatonic and chromatic melodic line will combine with the blues, to produce a polytonal music of two different keys or musical systems used at the same time. “Cotton Tail” based on the blues, is a remarkable example, of a richly harmonized, polytonal music. “Ko Ko” is another interesting example of harmonic boldness, using definite modulations or key changes and definite polytonal passages, yet with the music always lucid, under control and rounded out. These performances lead directly into bebop.
Ellington’s career led him to cope with the musical problem of the tin-pan-alley ballad, and its accompanying harmonic system. Great experimentation was needed to solve this problem. For a time, when the Duke moved away from the blues and folk-inspired music of his earlier period to such richer-sounding, sweetly harmonized works as “Reminiscing in Tempo,” or partially successful experiments in dissonance as “Crescendo in Blue” and “Diminuendo in Blue,” it was thought that he was slipping backward. But this was a necessary germination period, out of which came the magnificent Victor series of the late ‘thirties, where the blues return in full force but completely changed, the harmonies are freed from the tin-pan-alley straightjacket, the form is immaculate in its unity.
His influence was considerable upon the general run of popular band music, and for good. Fletcher Henderson used his style in such performances as “Hot and Anxious” and “Coming and Going,” Charlie Barnet in many rearrangements of Ellington works and original conceptions, Benny Goodman in performances of Ellington works, Louis Armstrong, Bob Crosby, Woody Herman, Benny Carter, Will Hudson, Artie Shaw, Jimmie Lunceford, Eddie Sauter, Raymond Scott. A great many “tone poems,” riff compositions, atmosphere and “mood” pieces were inspired by Ellington. They are largely worthless as permanent music, often representing only the commercially inspired practise of duplicating in innumerable copies every stylistic device invented by creative jazz. But still, within this process, we find creative jazz raising the level of musical performance. Impermanent as these jazz compositions are, it is an advance for people to be listening to an orchestral music actually conceived in instrumental terms, and to a harmonic system as fresh and exciting as often enters into these works. It may be that, as jazz continues to advance, many of Ellington’s records will have lost their interest. But there will be a core of about fifty records that are enduring contributions to jazz and American music. Over and above this contribution, Ellington’s career is that of a man who has been an educative force in all of American music. Typical of the contributions that jazz has continually made to American life, this has been the product of a self-educated musician, struggling with some of the most abstruse problems of music under the most prohibitive conditions.
Ellington’s latest move has been into the concert field, with works such as “Black, Brown and Beige” and “Liberia Suite.” These will be discussed in the next chapter. However, it can be said here that they mark another advance. If this step is not carried forward to its completion, it will not be Ellington’s fault. Rather it will be a result of the same contradiction that has plagued jazz from its New Orleans beginnings; the awareness by jazz musicians of solutions to new problems, which the miserable cultural life in which they have to work prevents them from realizing.
Bill Basie, called the “Count,” brought to jazz a style and body of music less varied than Ellington’s, but one deeply rooted in folk art, powerful in its influence on jazz up to and including bebop. Much of the power of his band and of its influence came, of course, from its individual performers. These included, at various times, such outstanding musicians as Shad Collins, Harry Edison and Buck Clayton on trumpet, Hershel Evans, Lester Young and Tab Smith on sax, Dickie Wells and Bennie Morton on trombone, a phenomenal rhythm section consisting of Basie himself on piano, Joe Jones on drums, Walter Page on bass and Freddie Green on guitar. Each of the above is a remarkable performer, both in his handling of the instrument and the solid quality of his musical ideas.
The music offered by the Basie band was founded on blues of the sweeter, mellow and folkish kind, reminiscent of old spirituals, and mountain dances, often in or suggesting a minor key. This kind of melody defines, as well as anything, the essential character of Kansas City jazz, for it is heard not only in Basie but in the fine piano pieces and arrangements of Mary Lou Williams, and in the blues piano of Pete Johnson. His forms were based on the riff, which he used with the greatest subtlety. Unlike some later, large-band mechanizations of the riff, the Basie performances used the riff, and its solo reply or obbligato, in a manner based on old choral spirituals. The “jump” rhythm, as he used it, also comes from a spirituals background, and in his hands it always has the human elasticity which it lacks in a manneristic treatment.
Instrumentally, Basie was strong in the one point where Ellington had been comparatively weak. Ellington had never made much of the solo tenor sax; a condition only partially remedied by the arrival of Ben Webster and Al Sears. The tenor sax became the leading solo instrument in the Basie band, and the other instruments tended to develop a tone and melodic style to parallel the sax. And so one hears a great deal of muted trumpet from Edison, Clayton and Collins, the tone sustained and given subtle, sax-like inflections. A somewhat similar style was worked out independently by Frankie Newton. The trombone likewise developed a new style, wholly different from the explosive “tailgate.” It spins out sustained melodic lines, depending for their effect upon the beauty of the melody itself, and upon its sudden twists and surprises, with a hint of the presence of two voices. Even the rhythm section developed a kind of singing style. Joe Jones gave the band a powerful, underlying beat, but the actual sound of the drums, merged with the string tone of Green’s guitar and Page’s bass, took on a juicy sound. We become conscious of the actual presence of the drums only in the very free, economical punctuations of the solos and the riffs. Jones’ teamwork with Lester Young or Dickie Wells, in which he seems to read their minds, is always a thing of beauty. Basie’s own piano style was similarly new, and similarly singing. It exploited mainly the right hand, which would reiterate a riff almost to the breaking point, and then, by delightful contrast, lay out a melody with widely spaced notes or chords. The left hand entered with sudden, surprise chords, punctuating the right hand melodic line, or suggesting the entrance of a “congregation” or chorus.
A good idea of the basic style of Kansas City melody can be gotten from the following records: “Topsy” by the Basie band, which in a half-serious, half-humorous way pictures a revival meeting; James Rushing’s singing of “Sent for You Yesterday” with the band; “Roll ‘em Pete” with Pete Johnson and Joe Turner; Mary Lou Williams’ “Harmony Blues”; Andy Kirk’s “Twinkling,” featuring Mary Lou Williams, and “Floyd’s Guitar Blues,” featuring Floyd Smith; Leroy Carr’s “How Long, How Long Blues” and “When the Sun Goes Down” given very beautiful performances by Basie’s piano accompanied by the rhythm section; Pete Johnson’s “You Don’t Know My Mind,” “Pete’s Blues,” “Kaycee on My Mind.” This music has its emotional limitations. It cannot represent the whole of jazz. But it belongs with the most full-throated, singing music in jazz, an imperishable addition to the knowledge we have of our riches of folk song. Like New Orleans music, it proves that jazz is not a style, but a music from which the style derives. “Kansas City Jazz” is such a music.
Like every other style derived from jazz music, Kansas City and the Basie style have become mannerisms of commercial and semi-commercial music. A great mass of the large, swing-band music drew upon the Basie use of riffs, solos, and jump beat. The riffs provided an easy solution of structural or “composition” problems. The improvisation within the chords, suggested by the riffs, provided an easy way of playing “hot.” The jump beat, a four-to-the-bar pattern with two sharply accented, and slightly delayed off-beats, actually two diametrically opposed rhythmic patterns, gives each bar a frenetic excitement which leaves an impression of something very stirring going on. But there is a great difference between the best Basie music and the swing band repetitions of it.
Basie’s use of the riff is sensitively musical. “One O’Clock Jump” is an example, starting with Basie’s piano and Morton’s trombone, then building up to its full band, riff climax. It is a fine piece of music, although it has been dinned into our ears so much by every large band that it has become hard to listen to with unbiased mind. “Taxi War Dance,” “Jump for Me,” “Swinging the Blues,” “Panassie Stomp,” are other good riff compositions. Another characteristic of Basie is that the riffs are varied throughout the performances; still another that they are, in themselves, melodies of great beauty. The riffs of “One O’Clock Jump,” “Jump for Me,” “Swinging the Blues,” have become part of the folk lore of swing music.
As for the jump beat, it was handled by the Basie band with the utmost elasticity, so that the solos are not in the least bound by it, but rather supported, as a base from which to soar. This is not the case with mechanical jump music, where the initial excitement given by the beat soon passes into monotony.
Lastly the solos themselves are no bare “noodling” of a chord, but are themselves melodic lines of real and lasting power. Lester Young has made the outstanding contribution to this kind of solo music, but it is noticeable that in the Basie performances, he rarely overbalances the others. There seems to be a fine interchange of ideas between him and Edison, Wells, Clayton, Collins, and Evans, so that all the solos stand up as music and all sound born out of the same musical source.
Of Basie’s band music, as of many other jazz contributors, it is possible to say that the greatest work is the early work. Sometimes this attitude is an indication only of critical laziness—praise of the music most familiar to us. In many cases, however, there is a real falling off. The reason is again the business-run, unmusical atmosphere of our entertainment world. Good music cannot be a short order product. It has a slow germination; an achievement should be respected and preserved until it is superseded by another work equally good. In the world Basie entered, however, any new contribution was immediately taken up and often so vulgarized as to become trite. The drive for continual novelty, without providing the conditions or the desire for the really new, resulted in superficiality. Works like the two-part “Miss Thing,” and the accompaniment to Paul Robeson singing “King Joe,” indicate how solid a large-band music Basie might have developed. Such a contribution, however, depends not only on a Basie, but on the conditions under which he has to work. If a band such as Ellington’s or Basie’s were made a national or local concern, given a steady, relaxed existence, removed from the terrible insecurity and homelessness that afflicts a band musician’s life, and encouraged to develop its own music, the results would be astounding. The story of jazz is not only the history of a great created music, but also the tragedy of a potentially great, never-created music.
If Basie’s influence upon large-band jazz was a fruitful one, his influence upon small-band jazz was even more far-reaching. It is unwise, in discussions of jazz, to trace direct influences from one figure to another. Such relationships are easy to draw on paper, but don’t generally correspond to the more complex facts. Yet Basie’s music was certainly one of the chief factors in the formation of the new kind of small-band music, wholly different from New Orleans and Dixieland style.
Basie’s own piano style indicates the base for this music. It employs the full piano, but uses rich chords and full sounds sparingly, to punctuate and support the solo melodic lines. His large-band music also has this character, the full band often heard in many performances only for punctuation. “Blue and Sentimental,” “Dogging Around,” “Twelfth St. Rag,” the full-band “Lady Be Good,” are examples of this large-band style which has the feeling of a small band. It was easy to move from this kind of music to an actual small-band music. A single trumpet, trombone and sax, if used together with a good knowledge of harmony, could sound chords as solid as a full-band choir. A single instrument, such as Basie’s piano or Young’s tenor, could riff as effectively as, and even more subtly than, a full band or full choir.
And so a small-band music came into being based on rich harmonized sounds, a combination of harmony and instrumental texture, the jump beat, the riff, the solo. Basie developed such a music in the “Jones-Smith” records, and those under the name of the “Kansas City Six” and “Seven.” We can see the change to a new kind of small-band music take place in Goodman, always the intelligent absorber of new trends. In his first trio and quartet records, with Teddy Wilson, Gene Krupa, and Lionel Hampton, he plays a refinement of Dixieland style. In records like “Pick-a-rib” he shows the transition to the riff style, which then dominates his sextet performances. Aiding in the latter were Basie himself, in some performances, “Cootie” Williams, George Auld and the great Charlie Christian on the guitar.
An interesting parallel may be observed here to European composed music. In the later nineteenth century, after the death of Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert, the symphonic concert hall tended toward showy, trivial virtuoso music. This led the serious composers to put their deepest thoughts into chamber music. Brahms is outstanding among those whose chamber music absorbed many harmonic and dynamic ideas from the symphony, even creating a symphonic kind of music for the violin and piano sonata. In our own century we find Schoenberg reducing the harmonic and instrumental texture of Wagner’s operatic writing down to a few instruments.
The parallel to jazz is not accidental. In both cases the avenues through which the artist can reach the largest public, and use the most ambitious forms are virtually shut to the honest musician. The concert hall was taken over by an upper class consisting of the declining aristocracy and its imitators among the newly rich; in its latest development it has become an adjunct of radio and recording chains. The large jazz band is also bound to the increasingly monopolized, musical entertainment system. The small group remains the place where the musician can work out his most sincere ideas; but the price he pays for this limited freedom is bare living, insecurity, and isolation from the public for whom he should be working.
It is this isolation that dominates the production of most modern jazz. It is a small-band music created mainly for musicians. This does not mean that the players disdain a larger audience, or that large audiences, when they get to know the music, do not enjoy it. There are no real operating relations, however, between the musician and the public. The public is limited in its choice to what radio and record company offer. The musician does not face a public he can respond to. The “public” to him is represented by the band manager, the agent who negotiates the recording date, the company official, the publicity man; everybody but the actual people for whom he should be playing.
This isolation has had its psychological effect upon jazz. It has given rise to cults. It has caused performers, sometimes, to turn to stimulants and narcotics, with their eventual ruin as musicians. In some modern jazz it has caused an experiment for experiment’s sake, a personal probing of new chord constructions and sequences, as a rebellion against the music that the prevalent practise forces upon the musician. These provide some ideas for new music, but they cannot be the new music itself.
With the exception of Ellington’s music, most modern jazz has evolved in an experimental laboratory consisting mainly of groups of players from large bands who worked out new ideas in privacy. Many experimental players found a home, long-term or temporary, in Jimmy Lunceford’s band, Cab Calloway’s, Earl Hines’, Woody Herman’s and Billy Eckstein’s. Some small groups, like John Kirby’s band or the King Cole trio, have been commercially successful but not with their best music. Many players today perform in “sweet” style in public life, and in fine hot style with small jam session groups. An example is the fine work of “King” Cole, on piano, and Les Paul, on guitar, in volumes four and seven of “Jazz at the Philharmonic.”
Small groups which served as the experimental laboratories were Jimmie Noone’s Apex Club band, with Earl Hines, back in the late ‘20’s; the Benny Goodman trio, quartet, quintet and sextet; the various groups which Teddy Wilson, Billie Holiday and Frankie Newton gathered for recording purposes. Many of these groups and sessions did not produce a music of absolute, lasting power. Yet they played a music far above the commercial music being heard at the time and, at the same time, avoided the “purist” repetition of Dixieland patterns. They broke new ground.
They often suffered from excessive harmonic sweetness, over-dependence on riffing for structure, or from instrumental brilliance for its own sake. This was a necessary avenue to progress, however, for the job they tackled was the exploration of the full tonal possibilities of the instrument, and the absorption of the popular ballad. When this was accomplished, as it is in much modern jazz and bebop, virtuosity for its own sake could be thrown away, leaving only skill in execution, and the popular ballad could be discarded, leaving only the new harmonic system and ideas that developed out of it.
Many of the records made by these groups are alive today. Some of the earlier Goodman records, like “Someday Sweetheart,” “Where or When,” “Sweet Lorraine,” “I Know that You Know,” are enjoyable, with Wilson’s piano fresh and fanciful. Some of the Holiday records, such as “I Wished on the Moon” and “What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” have not only Holiday’s finer singing but enjoyable work by Goodman and Eldridge. Another group of Holiday’s records enlist the services of Basie’s men, notably Lester Young, as in “Back in Your Own Back Yard,” “I Can’t Get Started,” “Easy Living,” “The Very Thought of You,” “When You’re Smiling,” “The Man I Love.” The Goodman sextet performances, with Christian, “Cootie” Williams, Auld and Basie, are memorable. “Red” Norvo and his “selected sextet,” including Teddy Wilson, Charlie Parker, John “Dizzy” Gillespie, “Slam” Stewart, “Flip” Phillips and J. C. Heard made a group of sides for Comet, “Congo Blues,” “Get Happy,” “Slam Slam Blues,” and “Hallelujah,” in which the qualities of bebop are heard, full blown.
Records have helped bring musicians and public partly together, for the record-buyers are generally more discriminating than heterogeneous theatre audiences. Particularly the smaller record companies, some of them operating on a shoe-string, have tried to take up where the large companies leave off, and record the better music that the musicians can play but the public can rarely hear. But this is no adequate solution. The small companies must also make money, and produce records that are strictly or semi-commercial, in performances often haphazard and insufficiently rehearsed.
Some record producers operate on the “genius” theory of jazz, according to which jazz is the creation of individual “geniuses” who mysteriously think up a “new music”; and so a great performance is to be achieved simply by throwing a group of these “geniuses” together. Or at the other extreme, the record sponsor thinks of himself as a “genius,” or at least an Ellington, and ruins the music with his own interference. Nothing is further from the truth. Jazz is predominantly a social music. The jazz performer doesn’t want to be known as a “genius,” but wants mainly to play the music that satisfies him, to find an audience interested in listening, to get a decent wage for performing it, and a decent home life and security. He does his best work with others, and for interested people.
To make good records is not easy. The sponsor must represent the audience and provide, in his own appreciation of the best music, the contagion of a living audience. He must select men who work well together; he must use musical ideas that the men have worked over, or feel they can work with. He must be interested in good music, rather than publicizing himself. He must provide time for rehearsal, or for some working out of the best possible use of the ideas.
To find good, live performances is also not easy. Except for such progressive steps as Norman Granz’s “Jazz at the Philharmonic” series, and some of the jam sessions, jazz club and Town Hall concerts in New York, jazz is heard either as part of a pretentious stage show in a movie house, or in a nightclub, where it remains, as Eddie Condon calls it, a “poor man’s music that only the rich can afford.”
The characteristics of modern jazz, including bebop, are the use of forms based on riffs, with solo elaborations on the chords implied in the riffs; the development of the jam session, encouraging the soloist to build his own musical structure out of a series of choruses; the intensification of rhythm; the absorption of the popular tune, and the development of its diatonic idiom into “strange” chords such as ninths and elevenths, familiar chords diminished or augmented, the use of chromatic notes, and free and continual change of key; the exploration of the extreme registers of the solo instrument; the reappearance of the blues, as a part of the new harmonic writing.
The line out of Kansas City music can be easily traced in a series of records. We can start with Basie’s “Topsy,” a work that has reappeared under different names. Leon “Chu” Berry’s “Maelstrom,” made with Cab Calloway’s band, carries a similar, minor-key, blues riff a step further. The Kansas City Seven’s “Destination K. C.,” with a small Basie group, is again in the same pattern, with freer solos. Coleman Hawkins’ “Ladies’ Lullaby,” made with a small group including Howard McGhee, carries the same kind of music onward. Gillespie’s “Good Bait” is a workable cross between straight Kansas City and bebop music. Finally Gillespie’s “One Bass Hit” and “Emmanon” carry the same procedure directly into the harmonic and rhythmic stratosphere of bebop. Even “Things to Come” is of the same pattern, although the Kansas City roots are heavily covered over.
The expansion of instrumental tone and technique took two forms; the refinement of collective tone, and the elaboration of the solo instrument. Both advanced together. In the Benny Goodman small-band records, from the first trio performances, through “Vibraphone Blues” with Lionel Hampton and the sextet’s “Air Mail Special,” and “As Long as I Live” we may see the subtle matching of timbres, the neat economy and control of the solos, the finesse of the rhythm. A major instrument, in modern jazz, is the tenor saxophone. Coleman Hawkins and “Chu” Berry led in giving the instrument a solid, unsentimental tone capable of the utmost refinement and the most impressive power, using it for subtle inflections of a melodic line and brilliant, rapid and staccato figurations. Illinois Jacquet is another tenor sax powerhouse, making a mannerism of the lowest honking tones and the highest screaming ones, but also capable of handling its middle registers with mastery. Charlie Parker made the alto sax an instrument of blinding technical brilliance, sometimes expressively sweet in tone but never saccharine, weaving melodic lines full of musical as well as technical surprises.
On trumpet and trombone the instrumental advances are less impressive, mainly due to the fact that New Orleans music, and its derivations, had exploited these instruments so fully. After Louis Armstrong, Lee Collins, “Cootie” Williams, Rex Stewart, “Kid” Ory, J. C. Higginbotham, Vic Dickenson, Sandy Williams, Jack Teagarden, Lawrence Brown, it is hard to see what more can be done with these instruments. The movement on trumpet was mainly towards the higher reaches of the instrument, partly for virtuoso display but also because the saxes filled in so much of the middle registers of the music. Henry Allen and Roy Eldridge worked out of Armstrong’s style into an exploitation of high notes and fast runs, dominated by a jump beat. Charlie Shavers and Howard McGhee developed brilliant melodic styles using the higher notes, and Gillespie, of course, set himself the challenge of playing faster than anybody had ever done before. The trombone took itself a more modest tonal and technical role, the “new” style in the hands of “Trummy” Young and J. J. Johnson being one of fluid movement into strange intervals and modulations.
Art Tatum on the piano brought concert-hall technique to jazz. Earl Hines’ brilliant suspended rhythms and harmonic curiosity fitted directly into the new jazz. On guitar the main innovation was the use of the electric instrument, which could cut through the noise of a dance floor and command a solo style based on sustained tones. The jazz use of this instrument, by men like Floyd Smith and Charlie Christian, shows again how sensitive and expressive a music jazz men can make out of an instrument that concert artists would consider a low in vulgarity. The string bass developed a more independent solo and melodic role, with John Kirby and Israel Crosby leading, and perhaps the greatest influence of all being Ellington’s Jimmy Blanton.
The intensification of rhythm took place with the increase of the four-to-the-bar jump beat to the eight-to-the-bar “boogie-woogie” beat and that to the sixteen-to-the-bar bebop beat. The basic beat, of course, was still the 4/4, and these intensifications control the melodic lines, which run counter to the basic beat, entering and leaving on off-beats and accenting the off-beats. All of these rhythmic intensifications could become sheer powerhouse effects. In bebop, however, there is some extraordinary new rhythmic work which can be at the same time genuinely musical. The solos enter and leave at any point within the sixteenth note divisions of the bar. They spin phrases of varying length, seemingly at random and yet satisfyingly controlled. The drums are handled more freely in supporting the solos and producing brilliant drum breaks and surprise clusters of beats. Max Roach, especially, has built up an amazing drum style, employing what seems to be a steady sixteen-note beat on the cymbals as his foundation, and moving about freely in rhythmic patterns with the bass drum and snares.
One of the most important achievements was the solution of the popular ballad problem, out of which came the harmonic exploration and freedom of modern jazz. This was done in many ways. The phrases of the ballad melody could be adorned with little chromatic figures, or broken chords, and modulated into surprising and distant keys. Coleman Hawkins’ “Body and Soul” is an example. Its phrases could be rhythmically transformed, turned into riffs, and separated by blues phrases. In this treatment Lester Young is the most extraordinary master. His solos, such as those on “Lady Be Good” with Basie, and on the Billie Holiday records, educated modern tenor sax men in the handling of their instrument and the “blue” treatment of the popular song idiom. There is never any straining for effect, or any obvious harmonic intellectualism, as there often is in Hawkins’ work. Young’s playing is completely relaxed, and often gives the tune a wholly new musical distinction with the most economical touches, sometimes reducing it to a poignantly repeated note or riff. There is always in his solos a suggestion of the two-voice, antiphonal quality basic to the great jazz solo and a product of the blues. His solos are in the great jazz line, not simply playing about with the melody improvisationally, but creating a new melodic structure of interest and beauty.
Another treatment of the popular tune used it as a bass line, over which a new melody was elaborated as a counter-voice, disguising the real theme. Many pre-bebop experiments and bebop performances start with such arrangements based on counter-voices to popular tunes, with the original tunes themselves never heard by the listener. Hawkins’ “Battle of the Saxes,” for example, seems to be “China Boy,” Parker’s “Ornithology” is “How High the Moon,” Gillespie’s “Dizzy Atmosphere” and “Dynamo A” are “I Got Rhythm,” his (Tempo Jazz Men), “Round About Midnight” adds to the blues a touch of “Louise.” Partly out of this kind of handling of the popular tune came a polytonal music, the definite use of two keys at once, of which Gillespie’s “I Can’t Get Started” and “Things to Come,” Parker’s “Buzzy” and the end of “Lover Man” are examples. Original themes are invented, serving as opening and closing riffs; themes of great interest and emotional power, and non-diatonic, in that they do not fall completely into any diatonic key. Many of these themes are based, like Ellington’s fine “Cotton Tail” theme, on the blues, although so rhythmically and melodically free that the original blues exists only in the performer’s mind.
In its varied progress, jazz has made a full turn of the wheel, and come back to certain qualities with which it started, but on a new level. A wonderful characteristic of the old jazz had been its feeling of melodic freedom, of harmonic freshness, of speaking its own human and disturbing melodic language. This quality returns in modern jazz.
There are differences between old and new, and important ones. On the one hand, the present language involves and has consciously absorbed the system of diatonic music, the “concert hall” and ballad music, to its immense enrichment; in fact, its possibilities are far richer than the uses that have been so far made of it. On the other hand, the old New Orleans musician made no distinction between his “public” and “private” music. The present day musician suffers from a divided mind, from thinking in terms of two different musical worlds.
There is today, as in the past, the conscious interplay of different musical languages in one work, with fascinating results; the mixture of blues, or of chromatic counter melodies, with popular ballads; the momentary quotation of sweet melodies, often semi-classical fragments, like “Souvenir,” “Anitra’s Dance,” or, as in an unrecorded Parker and Davis performance, an old hymn tune. Sometimes the effect of the mixed languages is atonal, as if key sense were completely absent; sometimes polytonal, with melodies in two distinct keys moving against each other.
A sign of the freedom won by modern jazz, and yet its return to qualities of the old music on a higher level, is the comeback of the blues, bringing, as they did in the past, the most haunting, expressive, personal and collective emotions. But the modern blues are enriched and transformed. The old phrases can be recognized, but with more chromatic twists, richer harmonies, more fluid and varied melodic movement. The change in attitude to the blues has been a steady movement throughout the history of jazz, and a necessary one. An old folk language, no matter how powerful it first was, can become misinterpreted, and over-sweet, in revival. The spirituals, if their true human meaning is not sharply insisted on, can become today an “Uncle Tom” music, of sweet escape. The blues, now that they are taken up by a variety of folklorists, can likewise take on a nostalgic, escapist quality, unless their human symbolism is sharply brought forward.
And so the jazz musicians, particularly the Negro, changed their attitude towards the blues, with their changing conditions and role in society. The blues have taken on more subtle changes of personal mood, and also a more embittered, sardonic character. Examples are Bechet’s recent performance of “St. James Infirmary,” or the singing of Josh White, the blues playing of Rex Stewart, as in “Solid Rock,” Frankie Newton’s “The Blues My Baby Gave to Me,” the trumpet playing of Joe Guy, the trombone blues of Dickie Wells. Lester Young is saturated in blues idiom, examples being his work in “Lester Leaps In,” “Dickie’s Dream,” “Lester Leaps Again,” “Slow Drag,” and his blues transformations of popular ballads. Theolonius Monk’s “Round About Mid-night” is blues in structure and feeling. Blues phrases account for the haunting quality of Gillespie’s trumpet figures as in “One Bass Hit” or “Round About Midnight,” where he begins by reversing the blues into an upward soaring line, itself suggested by his improvisation on “I Can’t Get Started.”
Charlie Parker is almost wholly a blues performer, as moving in his own way as Johnny Dodds in the old music. “Billie’s Bounce” is perhaps the most extraordinary of his blues solos, with “Cool Blues,” “Relaxing at Camarillo’s” and “Buzzy” very fine. His use of the blues “break” in “Billie’s Bounce” and the Red Norvo “Congo Blues” is a revelation. “The Chase,” with Dexter Gorden and Wardell Gray, starts with a haunting blues melody, and then moves into a pattern based on the traditional clarinet solo in “High Society.” Certainly the new jazz, like the old, is in great part a national music of the American Negro people, and expressed in it are not only the old experiences of exploitation, but the new ones; the jim-crow army, in the last war; the rising sharpness of the struggle for full citizenship.
What qualities make bebop differ from other modern and experimental jazz, such as that of Ellington, Teddy Wilson, Lester Young, Mary Lou Williams? There is no sharp cleavage. All that can really be said is that bebop has worked out a conscious, sometimes rigid, system from the new elements. Its starting themes are definitely atonal, polytonal or chromatic (the choice of the word depending on the system of analysis one uses). At any rate, these themes seem to start in one key and move immediately into another. Intervals such as seconds, fourths, diminished sevenths, ninths, flattened fifths are consistently used. The soloists consciously work out their performance in terms of these harmonies, both in supporting one another and playing against one another. The sixteenth note bar divisions are consistently used in solos and beat. Performances are based on counter-voices to melodies that are never heard “straight.”
Bebop comes close to composed music, in that worked-out performances are highly prized, and repeated many times almost note for note. A fine melodic theme is an achievement, and used as the basis for different performances, as the themes of “The Chase,” of “Dizzy Atmosphere” (“Dynamo A”), and “Hothouse.” Bebop brings Negro and white musicians working together in closer unity, and matching of ideas, than ever before. To mention “outstanding” names in jazz is always a task to be hesitantly approached. Jazz remains a social music, the product of many musicians and minds. The very commercial, publicity-run nature of the world in which it moves causes some names to rise to prominence, others who made an equal contribution to be ignored. However, just as Parker, Garner, Gillespie, Monk and Dameron can be definitely said to have made a solid contribution, as composers as well as performers, so the pianist Dodo Mamorosa, the tenor saxophonists Charlie Ventura and Allen Eager may be named among white musicians who have contributed fine technical and musical ideas.
Gillespie, Garner and Ventura exhibit the wit and kidding which are a joyous part of bebop. Parker, who is best in small band music, is the most “blue,” introspective and emotionally harrowing. Monk sees always the strange chord, often at the price of an unorganized piece of music. Gillespie, who also invented the term “bebop,” organized the most exciting, experimental large band music, aided by composer-arrangers like Les Fuller and John Lewis.
A full appraisal of modern jazz and bebop is a forbidding task, considering the sheer quantity of the records that have been pouring out, under a variety of labels, and the amount of live music that is being heard, some of it more exciting than the records. However, bebop is going through the same trials that afflicted all the other achievements of jazz, including blues, “boogie-woogie,” New Orleans music, jump music, Bix styles, “Chicago” style and the rest. There is the main line of creative, genuine and successful music making; there is the experimental wing, in which one often finds a half-successful music, a mechanical use of strange notes and chords simply to be “different”; there is the commercialization, the uncritical publicizing of bad and good, mostly bad, together, the taking over of the new achievement for innumerable imitations that only serve to bring bewilderment to listeners.
The modern experimental jazz, a term better than bebop for the new jazz music heard today, is a bundle of contradictions. It works with the basic method of folk art, improvisation, but demands the utmost harmonic education and sensitivity from the improvisors. It advances boldly into composition, but because of the conditions under which it must work out its ideas, it often sounds like a magnificent opening to a musical work not followed by any development. It brings together Negro and white musicians in a tighter unity and musical collaboration than ever before in the history of jazz. But it also has aspects of faddism. It dabbles with the superficial philosophical lingo of existentialism, and with unique styles of speech and dress, as if it were a cult. It attracts many of the most thoughtful musicians in jazz, and also suffers from nerve-strain, and the drink and narcotic by-products of the insecurity of jazz life. It produces genial records like “A Night in Tunisia,” “Congo Blues,” and “Dizzy Atmosphere,” and also haunting records like “The Chase,” or Parker’s sick, nerve-wracked “Lover Man,” made when he was at the point of collapse. It is a music full of melody, although this melody, made up of the blues or of counter-voices to popular tunes, takes keen listening to follow its strange twists and turns. Yet it also produces a wholly unmelodic music, which in its mechanical use of “new” chords, modulations and instrumental timbres only sounds like the less inspired music created by modern European composers. Some of it belongs with the most lasting and beautiful music of jazz. Some of it is merely light and witty entertainment, and only gets by with its audiences because they are not familiar with the better “classical” composed music exploiting similar harmonies and timbres. Most of Stan Kenton’s music seems to this writer to consist of this kind of entertainment. But the presence and popularity even of this music has its commentary to make on the idiocy of our present division between the “classical” and “popular” worlds of music. For the followers of this “popular” music are actually enjoying a harmonic, rhythmic and instrumental idiom that still seems “advanced” and hard to take to many patrons of the concert halls.
Bebop and modern jazz have by no means settled the problems of jazz. In fact, they raise the contradictions inherent in jazz from its beginnings, to their highest level. These contradictions within a music are directly a product of the contradictions in our social life, predominantly rising out of the place of the Negro people in American life.
By this I do not mean that jazz is exclusively a music of the Negro people, or a problem of the Negro people. I mean that the culture of an entire people, like its democracy, cannot be understood or put on a healthy footing without solving the problem of the culture, and political freedom, of the minority peoples who together make up its great majority. The largest and most exploited minority is the Negro people. I have already taken up, in the first chapter, some of the reasons for the predominance of the Negro people in jazz. This was not due to any physical characteristics, “African” or otherwise. The Negro people in America have a tradition of achievement and struggle which goes all the way back to Africa, but have no longer a direct line of physical ancestry to Africa. They are thoroughly mixed in heritage, as are all of us. The Negro born in a Northern city environment is as likely to find the blues and spirituals strange to him, or to be as clumsy on a dance floor, as his white fellow citizen. On the other hand white city dwellers can discover and master rhythm, love and use the blues, when they feel the living need for these forms of art and life. The Negro and white have exactly the same potentialities either for jazz or for conducting a Schubert symphony.
The predominance of the Negro people in jazz is due to social and cultural reasons; the need of the Negro communities to make their own entertainment, the place that song and dance held in the life of Negro children, the special social and emotional content that entered the music created by the Negro people. What they had to say could not be directly expressed otherwise except in real and sharp struggle, such as accompanied the development of jazz. There is a direct line of development from the old jazz to the new, a line of change, not of static preservation of old qualities. Modern jazz is a human and social musical expression not, as the “purists” would have it, a commercial conspiracy. The old jazz was a protest against the narrowness of semi-feudal, Southern life, in the years before the First World War, using the idioms and forms given it by semi-feudal life. Modern jazz is a protest against monopoly control of music and the commodity-like exploitation of the musicians, a protest using the idioms and forms given it by commercial music.
In modern times the Negro musician has led the jazz field for new added reasons. What operates heavily now is the jim-crow and discrimination directed against the Negro in the classical music field, a powerful factor now that the Negro musician has slowly won his battle to include in his music, change or reject if he wishes, all the developments in science, method and technique of world music. The musical education of the Negro people is drastically low, far lower than that, bad as it is, given to white children. The luxury of attending a music school or conservatory is difficult for the Negro, due to his being kept in the lowest paid jobs. Jim-crow pervades all the better paying jobs and professions. Jim-crow pervades music, on radio, in Hollywood, in opera and symphony. It is enlightening to anyone who thinks that discrimination or prejudice come from poor “education,” to discover that discrimination multiplies geometrically as we go up the social ladder. Symphony orchestras are far behind jazz bands in recognizing Negro talent. A conductor of the outstanding ability of Dean Dixon cannot get a job conducting. Singers of the calibre of Marian Anderson, Roland Hayes, Paul Robeson, Carol Brice, Dorothy Maynor, never get a nod from the Metropolitan opera, which has employed even second-rate and third-rate singers for their connections and Hollywood glamour. In movies, on radio, on Broadway, the Negro is jim-crowed, allowed to work, if at all, as a special kind of entertainer, never permitted to fill a role simply because he is best able to fill it. The major symphony orchestras hire no Negro performers, well-equipped as some of them are. The Negro people have no music schools, music theatre, musical organizations of their own, through which they can take part in the broad musical life possible in our times.
Thus the creative imagination of the Negro musician has been poured largely into the narrow frame of dance and light entertainment music, often stretching the boundaries of this form to the very limit. The results have benefited American song and dance music by immeasurably raising its musical quality and emotional content. They have permitted great fortunes to be earned, less often by the creative musician than by the merchandiser able to cash in on the latest “novelty” he could make out of some innovation by a Negro musician. It is because so much talent and genius have been poured into jazz music, old and new, that this music has its present, quality.
But modern jazz, for this very reason, is not a completely satisfactory music. There is too great a disparity between the musical ideas, the inventiveness applied to them, the emotions demanding expression, and the narrow forms. Some modern jazz sounds overweighted harmonically and overelaborate in instrumental texture, without the melodic line and structure to carry the ideas forward. The reason is that there is a horizontal as well as vertical character to music, and the two must be proportionate. Some musical problems, like those facing a painter and writer, require space to work themselves out. A Michelangelo couldn’t put his Sistine Chapel conceptions on a postcard; a Tolstoi couldn’t put the emotions of “Anna Karenina” into a magazine short-short; a Beethoven couldn’t put the emotions of the “Appassionata” into a scherzo.
Jazz has reached a kind of impasse, a peak beyond which it can go no further within the forms in which it exists today. There may be slight innovations, such as the use of new rhythms, new instruments, larger orchestras. But these are minor changes. Jazz, for its next step forward, calls for a change as radical and sweeping as that which took place when it moved up the Mississippi River. It is knocking at the door of musical composition, in more ambitious forms, and must enter.
This thought may bring violent protest from those who cannot see anything new, or who say that composed music is classical music, “for whites only” (disguising this jim-crow by all kinds of praise for the wonderful Negro “folk,” and all kinds of epithets directed against the “degenerate” practise of composing music); jazz is pure improvisation, and never the twain shall meet. It may bring serious questions from those who prize the improvisational character of jazz, and feel that it thus adds something unique to our musical culture which should not be taken away.
However, we have seen that there is no absolute division between improvised and composed music. They are different, but not hermetically sealed from one another. The difference is not between two different worlds of music, but between two different uses of music. Improvisation is an amateur, folk and peoples’ way of making music, immensely important for its genuine entertainment, its development of fresh musical ideas, its making music a part of personal and social life. Larger forms of music demand composition, the working out of music to embody more complex problems of human conflict and emotion, more subtle portrayals of the processes of human thought. Composed music does not negate improvised. Modern civilization requires the musical expression to be found in the more ambitious forms and structures, just as it needs the amateur spirit, the participation in music of large masses of people, the influx of new language materials that can only come from widespread folk and musical improvisation. The two can be of the greatest musical assistance. It is when the composed forms are most accessible to people, and advance most freely, that improvisation also advances and spreads enormously. Similarly, we can say that if we had a nationwide theatre, a living stage in every sizeable community, not only would the writing of fine plays be multiplied but the progress of amateur and semi-professional dramatic life among the people would advance equally. Modern jazz is a living music, but even more, has within it a new music, clamoring to be born.
The problem of the next step forward, however, is a social as well as a musical problem. The Negro people have not been content to be treated as second-class citizens, discriminated against, made the butt of insult. They have fought for equality in pay, equal opportunities for jobs, votes and education with all other American people. This struggle, carried on in the political and economic fields, has also been carried on in music. It is reflected in the kind of advances that took place in jazz during the ‘thirties and ‘forties. It is also reflected in the increasing struggle of Negro people for a musical education and a foothold in the concert and opera world.
The next step calls for a democratic change in our entire musical culture. It involves the breakdown of the last vestiges of snobbery towards folk, amateur and popular art production; the broadening of the classical musical picture, so that musical education is more widespread, providing more opportunities for American composers to reach American audiences, and a healthier spirit in composed music; the breakdown of the barriers which prevent the minority peoples, and especially the Negro people, from taking an active part in musical production on every level, from the most immediately popular forms of art to the most advanced and ambitious structures. In other words the next step for jazz is bound up with the breakdown of discrimination wherever it is found in our social and cultural life.
