Like a sunbeam ’mid the clouds up in the sky;
Though the rest were deep in crime
You stayed spotless all the time
Though they flayed you
Till they made you
Weep and cry.
When your little heart was aching for a mother’s tender love,
Then the Lord looked down and heard you and blessed you from above.
Though they tried to make you bad
You stayed good, dear little lad.
Would God I could
Be half as good
As you
_Oliver Twist_.
The music is just like that, too. Lower than this--much lower, at
least--the popular song never dropped. These songs _never_ become
actually, universally popular because the general taste is too high.
And I cheerfully set the lowest example beside _A Perfect Day_ for
comparison. One type is not obnoxious and the other is; one is common,
the other vulgar; one is strong and foolish, the other silly and weak.
The case for the popular song may as well rest in the solution of this
dilemma as anywhere.
_Toujours Jazz_
TOUJOURS JAZZ
The word jazz is already so complicated that it ought not to be
subjected to any new definitions, and the thing itself so familiar
that it is useless to read new meanings into it. Jazz is a type of
music grown out of ragtime and still ragtime in essence; it is also
a method of production and as such an orchestral development; and
finally it is the symbol, or the byword, for a great many elements in
the spirit of the time--as far as America is concerned it is actually
our characteristic expression. This is recognized by Europeans; with
a shudder by the English and with real joy by the French, who cannot,
however, play it.
The fact that jazz is our current mode of expression, has reference
to our time and the way we think and talk, is interesting; but if
jazz music weren’t itself good the subject would be more suitable
for a sociologist than for an admirer of the gay arts. Fortunately,
the music and the way it is played are both of great interest, both
have qualities which cannot be despised; and the cry that jazz is the
enthusiastic disorganization of music is as extravagant as the prophecy
that if we do not stop “jazzing” we will go down, as a nation, into
ruin. I am quite ready to uphold the contrary. If--before we have
produced something better--we give up jazz we shall be sacrificing
nearly all there is of gaiety and liveliness and rhythmic power in
our lives. Jazz, for us, isn’t a last feverish excitement, a spasm of
energy before death. It is the normal development of our resources,
the expected, and wonderful, arrival of America at a point of creative
intensity.
Jazz is good--at least good jazz is good--and I propose to summarize
some of the known reasons for holding it so. The summary will take me
far from the thing one hears and dances to, from the thing itself. The
analysis of jazz, musically or emotionally, is not likely to be done
in the spirit of jazz itself. There isn’t room on the printed page for
a glissando on the trombone, for the sweet sentimental wail of the
saxophone, or the sudden irruptions of the battery. Nor is there need
for these--intellectually below the belt--attacks. The reason jazz is
worth writing about is that it is worth listening to. I have heard it
said by those who have suffered much that it is about the only native
music worth listening to in America.
Strictly speaking, jazz music is a new development--something of the
last two years, arriving long after jazz had begun to be played. I
mean that ragtime is now so specifically written for the jazz band
that it is acquiring new characteristics. Zez Confrey, Irving Berlin,
Fred Fisher, and Walter Donaldson, among others, are creating their
work as jazz; the accent in each bar, for example, is marked in the
text--the classic idea of the slight accent on the first note of each
bar went out when ragtime came in; then ragtime created its own classic
notion,--the propulsion of the accent from the first (strong) note to
the second (weak). In jazz ragtime the accent can occur anywhere in the
bar and is attractively unpredictable. Rhythmically--essentially--jazz
is ragtime, since it is based on syncopation, and even without jazz
orchestration we should have had the full employment of precise and
continuous syncopation which we find in jazz now, in _Pack Up Your
Sins_, for example. It is syncopation, too, which has so liberated jazz
from normal polyphony, from perfect chords, that M Darius Milhaud is
led to expect from jazz a full use of polytonic and atonic harmonies;
he notes that in _Kitten on the Keys_ there exists already a chord of
the perfect major and the perfect minor. The reason why syncopation
lies behind all this is that it is fundamentally an anticipation or
a suspension in one instrument (or in the bass) of what is going to
happen in another (the treble); and the moment in which a note occurs
prematurely or in retard is, frequently, a moment of discord on the
strong beat. A dissonance sets in which may or may not be resolved
later. The regular use of syncopation, therefore, destroyed the fallacy
(as I hold it) of the perfect ear; and this is one reason why Americans
are often readier to listen to modern music than peoples who haven’t
got used to dissonance in their folk and popular music.
It is not only syncopation that makes us indebted to negro music.
Another element is the typical chord structure found there, the
characteristic variations from the accustomed. Technically described,
one of the most familiar is the subdominant seventh chord with
the interval of a minor instead of a major seventh--a method of
lowering the leading tone which affects so distant a piece as _A
Stairway to Paradise_, where the accented syllable of Par´-adise is
skilfully lowered. (By extension ragtime also uses the “diminished
third.”) The succession of dominant sevenths and of ninths is another
characteristic, and the intrusion of tones which lie outside of our
normal piano scale is common.[8] Still another attack on the perfect
chord comes from the use of the instruments of the jazz band, one
for which ragtime had well prepared us. The notorious slide of the
trombone, now repeated in the slide of the voice, means inevitably that
in its progress to the note which will make an harmonious chord, the
instrument passes through discords. “Smears,” as they are refreshingly
called, are the deadliest enemy of the classic tradition, for the
ear becomes so accustomed to discords in transition that it ceases
to mind them. (We hear them, of course; the pedants are wrong to say
that we will cease to appreciate the “real value” of a discord if
we aren’t pained by it and don’t leave the hall when one is played
without resolution.) In contemporary ragtime, it should be noted,
the syncopation of the tonality--playing your b-flat in the bass just
before it occurs in the voice, let us say--is often purely a method of
warning, an indication of the direction the melody is to take.
I put the strange harmonies of jazz first, not because they are its
chief characteristic, but because of the prejudice against them.
The suggestion is current that they are sounds which ought never to
be uttered; and with this goes an attack on the trick instruments,
the motor-horns, of the battery-man. The two things have nothing in
common. The instruments of the jazz band are wholly legitimate and its
characteristic instrument was invented by a German, after whom it is
named, in the middle of the last century, and has been used in serious
music by (and since) Meyerbeer--I refer to the saxophone. There is no
more legal objection to the muted trombone than to the violin _con
sordino_. And the opponents of jazz bands will do well to remember that
the pure and lovely D-minor symphony of César Franck was thrown out as
a symphony because it used the English horn. The actual sounds produced
by the jazz band are entirely legitimate. We have yet to see what use
they make of them.
* * * * *
In Krehbiel’s book the whole question of rhythm is comparatively taken
for granted, as it should be. Syncopation discovered in classic music,
in the Scot’s snap of the Strathspey reel, in Hungarian folk music,
is characteristic of three-fifths of the negro songs which Krehbiel
analyzed (exactly the same proportion, by the way, as are in the
interval of the ordinary _major_). But it is such a normal phenomenon
that I have never found a composer to be interested in it. Krehbiel, to
be sure, does refer to the “degenerate form” of syncopation which is
the basis of our ragtime, and that is hopeful because it indicates that
ragtime is a development--intensification, sophistication--of something
normal in musical expression. The free use of syncopation has led our
good composers of ragtime and jazz to discoveries in rhythm and to a
mastery of complications which one finds elsewhere only in the great
composers of serious music. In describing the Dahoman war dances at the
Chicago World’s Fair, Krehbiel says:
“Berlioz in his supremest effort with his army of drummers produced
nothing to compare _in artistic interest_ with the harmonious drumming
of these savages. The fundamental effect was a combination of double
and triple time, the former kept by the singers, the latter by the
drummers, but it is impossible to convey the idea of the wealth of
detail achieved by the drummers by means of exchange of the rhythms,
syncopation of both simultaneously, and dynamic devices.”
The italics are mine. I am fully aware of the difference between savage
and sophisticated, between folk music and popular music; yet I cannot
help believing that this entire statement, including the Berlioz whom
I greatly admire, could be applied to Paul Whiteman playing _Pack Up
Your Sins_ or his incredible mingling of _A Stairway to Paradise_ with
a sort of _Beale Street Blues_.
Freedom with rhythm is audible--should I say palpable?--everywhere.
_Stumbling_ (Zez Confrey) is in effect a waltz played against a more
rapid counter-rhythm, and is interesting also for its fixed groups of
uneven notes--triplets with the first note held or omitted for a time,
and then with the third note omitted. A similar effect with other
means occurs in the treatment of three notes in _Innocent Ingénue
Baby_, by George Gershwin, where the same note falls under a different
beat with a delightful sense of surprise and uncertainty. Mr Hooker’s
words are equally tricky, for it isn’t “Innocent-Ingénue-Baby” at
all; it is Innocent Ingénue (_baby_). In _By and By_ Gershwin has
shifted an accent from the first to the second simply by giving the
second the time-value usually given to the first, a fresh, delightful
treatment of a sentimental expression. The variety of method is vastly
interesting. Louis Hirsch, whom I rank fairly low as a composer
for jazz, has done perfectly one obvious, necessary thing: stopped
syncopating in the middle of a piece of ragtime. In the phrase “shake
and shimmy everywhere” in _It’s Getting Very Dark on Old Broadway_,
he presents the whole-tone scale descending in two bars of full
unsyncopated quarter-notes. In the works of Zez Confrey (they are
issued with a snobbish tasty cover, rather like the works of Claude
Debussy) the syncopation and the exploitation of concurrent, apparently
irreconcilable rhythms is first exasperating and eventually exciting.
They are specifically piano pieces and require a brilliant proficiency
to render them.
It is a little difficult, unless one has the piano score, to determine
what part is the work of the composer, what of the jazz orchestra.
You can only be fairly certain that whatever melody occurs is the
composer’s, and that rhythmically he is followed with some fidelity.
All you need to do is to listen to the violin, piano, or whatever
instrument it is which holds the beat, to realize what the composer has
given. Harmonization is often, and orchestration nearly always, left to
other hands. Mr Berlin makes a habit now of giving credit to his chief
collaborator, and he deserves it.[9]
* * * * *
Mr Berlin’s masterpieces (June, 1923, but who shall say?) in jazz are
_Everybody Step_ and _Pack Up Your Sins_. I have written so much about
him in connexion with song and shows that I can say little more. I
see no letting down of his energy, none in his inventiveness. He is,
oddly, one of the simplest of our composers. A good way to estimate his
capacity is to play the more sentimental songs (_I’m Gonna Pin My Medal
on the Girl I Left Behind_, _Someone Else May Be There While I’m Gone_,
_All by Myself_) in slow time and then in fast. The amazing way they
hold together in each tempo, the way in which the sentiment, the flow
of the melody, disengages itself in the slow, and then the rhythm, the
beat takes first place in the fast time, is exceptional. You cannot do
the same with his own _Some Sunny Day_, nor with _Chicago_ or _Carolina
in the Morning_. Berlin’s work is musically interesting, and that means
it has a chance to survive. I have no such confidence in _Dardanella_
or _Chicago_. The famous unmelodic four notes occur in the latter as
in _Pack Up Your Sins_ (the source is the same, but we need not go
into that); the working out is vastly inferior. Fred Fisher’s work is
sledge hammer in comparison with Berlin’s, and lacks Berlin’s humour.
Of that quality Walter Donaldson has some, and Gershwin much. Donaldson
wrote Al Jolson’s _Mammy_ (I can’t remember which, but I’m afraid
I didn’t like it), and a song I count heavily on: _Carolina in the
Morning_. This song is, incidentally, a startling example of how jazz
is improving the lyrics, for the majority of jazz songs are not meant
primarily for singing, so the balladists take liberties, and not being
held to a definite end-rhyme give us “strolling with your girlie when
the dew is pearly early in the morning.”[10] The music is clean, rapid,
and audacious. It carries the introduction (of the chorus) almost to
the point of exhaustion, suspending the resolution of its phrases until
the last possible moment, and then lets go, with a vast relief on the
long, somewhat yodelly note. Confrey has done the same thing in _Kitten
on the Keys_ where one bar is repeated five times with successive
tightening of interest.
[Illustration:
GEORGE GERSHWIN
]
Two composers are possible successors to Berlin if he ever chooses
to stop. I omit Jerome Kern--a consideration of musical style will
indicate why. I am sure of Gershwin and would be more sure of Cole
Porter if his astonishing lyrics did not so dazzle me as to make me
distrust my estimate of his music. Gershwin is in Berlin’s tradition;
he has almost all the older man’s qualities as a composer (not as a
lyrics writer; nor has he Berlin’s sense of a song on the stage).
That is to say, Gershwin is capable of everything, from _Swanee_ to
_A Stairway to Paradise_. His sentiment is gentler than Berlin’s, his
“attack” more delicate. Delicacy, even dreaminess, is a quality he
alone brings into jazz music. And his sense of variation in rhythm,
of an oddly placed accent, of emphasis and colour, is impeccable.
He isn’t of the stage, yet, so he lacks Berlin’s occasional bright
hardness; he never has Berlin’s smartness; and with a greater musical
knowledge he seems possessed of an insatiable interest and curiosity.
I feel I can bank on him. Banking on Porter is dangerous because
essentially he is much more sophisticated in general attitude of mind
than any of the others, and although he has written ragtime and patter
songs and jazz of exceptional goodness, he has one quality which may
bar him forever from the highest place--I mean that he is essentially a
parodist. I know of no one else with such a sense for musical styles.
A blues, a 1910 rag, a Savoy operetta serio-comic love song, a mother
song--he writes them all with a perfect feeling for their musical
nature, and almost always with satiric intention, with a touch of
parody. It is only the most sophisticated form which is germane to
him; in highly complex jazzing he is so much at home, his curiosity is
so engaged, he feels the problem so much, that the element of parody
diminishes. Yet _The Blue Boy Blues_, almost as intricate a thing as
Berlin ever wrote, with a melody overlaid on a running syncopated
comment, has a slight touch of parody in the very excess of its skill.
Jazz has always mocked itself a little; it is possible that it will
divide and follow two strains--the negro and the intellectual. In the
second case Porter will be one of its leaders and Whiteman will be his
orchestra. The song _Soon_, for example, is a deliberate annihilation
of the Southern negro sentiment carefully done by playing Harlem jazz,
with a Harlem theme, mercilessly burlesquing the _clichés_ of the
Southern song--the Swanee-Mammy element--in favour of a Harlem alley.
Porter’s parody is almost too facile; _Soon_ is an exasperatingly
good piece of jazz in itself. He is a tireless experimenter, and the
fact that in 1923 others are doing things he tried in 1919, makes me
wonder whether his excessive intelligence and sophistication may not
be pointing a way which steadier and essentially more _native_ jazz
writers will presently follow. Native, I mean, to jazz; taking it more
seriously. Whether any of them could compose such a ballet as Porter
did for the Ballet Suédois is another question.
The other way is still open--the way of Sissle and Blake, of Creamer
and Layton, of A. Harrington Gibbs. The last is a name unknown to me
ten days before the moment of writing; I do not know if it represents
a Southern negro or a Welshman. But--if he has composed anything, if
_Runnin’ Wild_ isn’t a direct transcript of a negro devil-tune--he is
in the school of the negro composers and he has accomplished wonders
already. For _Runnin’ Wild_ is a masterpiece in its _genre_. Note
the cleverness of the execution: the melody is virtually without
accompaniment; it consists of groups of three notes, the interval of
time being simple, and the interval of pitch in the group or between
two successive groups, is quite conventional. Once three groups of
three notes are played in succession; toward the end the group is twice
lengthened to four notes; the orchestra is heard after each group has
been sung, giving an unnerving effect of alternating sound and silence.
But there is something more: There is the complete evocation of the
two negro spirits--the darky (South, slave) and the buck (Harlem);
the negro and the nigger. It ends with a shout which is lyrical and
ecstatic at once, wild and free. It is an enchantingly gay piece, it
expresses its title--one sees our own Gilda Grey stepping out in it
bravely; it is, in a way, a summary of the feeling of negro music which
_Shuffle Along_ and its followers restored to prominence.
More must be said of the negro side of jazz than I can say here. Its
technical interest hasn’t yet been discussed by anyone sufficiently
expert and sufficiently enthusiastic at the same time. In words and
music the negro side expresses something which underlies a great deal
of America--our independence, our carelessness, our frankness, and
gaiety. In each of these the negro is more intense than we are, and we
surpass him when we combine a more varied and more intelligent life
with his instinctive qualities. _Aggravatin’ Papa_ (don’t you try
to two-time me) isn’t exactly the American response to a suspected
infidelity, yet it is humanly sound, and is only a little more simple
and savage than we are. The superb _I’m Just Wild about Harry_ is,
actually, closer to the American feeling of 1922 than “I Always dream
of Bill”; as expression it is more honest than, say, _Beautiful Garden
of Roses_; and _He May be Your Man_ is simply a letting down of our
reticences, a frankness beyond us.
I shift between the two teams, Sissle and Blake, Creamer and Layton,
uncertain which has most to give. Sissle and Blake wrote _Shuffle
Along_; the others accomplished the intricate, puzzling rhythm of
_Sweet Angelina_, one or two other songs in _Strut Miss Lizzie_, and
_Come Along, I’m through with Worrying_. Of this song a special word
can be said. It is based on _Swing Low, Sweet Chariot_, and imposes on
that melody a negro theme (the shiftlessness and assurance of “bound
to live until I die”) and a musical structure similar to that applied
to the same original by Anton Dvořak in the _New World Symphony_. I
am only a moderate admirer of this work; I am not trying to put _Come
Along_ into the same category, for its value is wholly independent of
its comparative merits; nor am I claiming that jazz is equal to or
greater or less than symphonic music. But I do feel that the treatment
of a negro melody, by negroes, to make a popular and beautiful song for
Americans ought not to be always neglected, always despised. I say also
that our serious composers have missed so much in not seeing what the
ragtime composers have done, that (like Lady Bracknell) they ought to
be exposed to comment on the platform.
If they cannot hear the almost unearthly cry of the _Beale Street
Blues_ I can only be sorry for them; the whole of Handy’s work is
melodically of the greatest interest and is to me so versatile, so
changing, in quality, that I am incapable of suggesting its elements.
Observed in the works of others, the blues retain some of this elusive
nature--they are equivocal between simplicity, sadness, irony, and
something approaching frenzy. The original negro spiritual has had
more respect, but the elements have been sparsely used, and one
fancies that even in looking at these our serious composers have
felt the presence of a regrettable vulgarity in syncopation and in
melodic line. _Jesus Heal’ de Sick_ is negro from the Bahamas; its
syncopation, its cry, “Bow low!” are repeated in any number of others;
the spirituals themselves were often made out of the common songs in
which common feeling rose to intense and poetic expression--as in
_Round About de Mountain_, a funeral song with the Resurrection in a
magnificent phrase, “An she’ll rise in His arms.” The only place we
have these things left, whether you call the present version debased
or sophisticated, gain or loss, is in ragtime, in jazz. I do _not_
think that the negro (in African plastic or in American rag) is our
salvation. But he has kept alive things without which our lives would
be perceptibly meaner, paler, and nearer to atrophy and decay.
I say the negro is not our salvation because with all my feeling
for what he instinctively offers, for his desirable indifference to
our set of conventions about emotional decency, I am on the side of
civilization. To anyone who inherits several thousand centuries of
civilization, none of the things the negro offers can matter unless
they are apprehended by the mind as well as by the body and the spirit.
The beat of the tom-tom affects the feet and the pulse, I am sure; in
_Emperor Jones_ the throbbing of the drum affected our minds and our
sensibilities at once. There will always exist wayward, instinctive,
and primitive geniuses who will affect us directly, without the
interposition of the intellect; but if the process of civilization
continues (will it? I am not so sure, nor entirely convinced that
it should) the greatest art is likely to be that in which an
uncorrupted sensibility is _worked_ by a creative intelligence. So
far in their music the negroes have given their response to the world
with an exceptional naïveté, a directness of expression which has
interested _our_ minds as well as touched our emotions; they have
shown comparatively little evidence of the functioning of _their_
intelligence. _Runnin’ Wild_, whether it be transposed or transcribed,
is singularly instinctive, and instinctively one recognizes it and
makes it the musical motif of a gay night. But one falls back on
_Pack Up Your Sins_ and _Soon_ as more interesting pieces of music
even if one can whistle only the first two bars. (I pass the question
of falling farther back, to the music of high seriousness, which is
another matter; it is quite possible, however, that the _Sacre du
Printemps_ of Strawinsky, to choose an example not unaffected by the
jazz age, will outlive the marble monument of the Music Box.)
* * * * *