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Frederic Ramsey

Autor de Jazzmen

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The first books to treat jazz seriously appeared in the 1930s. Critics and commentators in the 1920s either dismissed the music as an aberration, confused it with popular song and novelty ragtime, or fell for the placid orchestral sounds of Paul Whiteman and Ted Lewis. The publicity and promotion that made Whiteman the “King of Jazz” in the 1920s seems to have spurred aficionados of ‘hot’ jazz to draw public attention toward what they regarded as the real thing. Robert Goffin and Hugues Panassié carried the banner for hot jazz in Europe. In the U.S., advocates for the ‘real jazz’ were represented by the contributors to Jazzmen (1939), edited by Frederic Ramsey, Jr. and Charles Edward Smith.

A collection of essays by nine different writers, Jazzmen revealed hitherto unknown information (some more mythical than factual) on the roots of jazz in New Orleans and Chicago and the migration of musicians up and down the Mississippi River basin. The editors found the trumpeter Willie “Bunk” Johnson—a contemporary of Buddy Bolden—driving a truck in New Iberia, and contributors interviewed a number of other nearly forgotten jazzmen and their associates. The writers in Jazzmen reported as journalists and witnesses, with proximity to and familiarity with the contours of the American social and cultural landscape that was out of reach for European writers like Goffin and Panassié, who only knew jazz from recordings and from concerts by the likes of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra and Louis Mitchell’s Jazz Kings. The Jazzmen contributors knew their way around the dives and dancehalls where musicians worked, they knew the geography of nightlife neighborhoods, the sights, sounds, and smells of American cities. Reading now, Jazzmen gives us the telling anecdote, the insider recollection and the local color of a particular American moment, without the primitivism of Goffin and Panassié, who romanticized the naïve, uncultured spontaneity of the Negro. (Mezz Mezzrow’s collaborator Bernard Wolfe had something to say about white perceptions of black culture.) Jazzmen comes from a place closer to the source of the music.

E. Simms Campbell, “Blues”
The cartoonist and illustrator E. Simms Campbell wrote the chapter called “Blues” in Jazzmen. Campbell was born in St. Louis, and as a youth rode the riverboats that carried the early Negro bands as entertainment. He was there the night Fate Marable’s band played on the steamer “St. Paul” and a knife fight broke out. The band kept playing, and Campbell climbed on top of the old upright piano to get a better view of the proceedings. He knew the sporting houses, gamblers and rounders from New Orleans to Memphis to Kansas City. He heard King Oliver preach a sermon with his talking trumpet, and had his coat and hat stolen as he stared bewitched at the beads of sweat pouring off the head of Louis Armstrong playing a new piece called “Heebie Jeebies.” He heard the boogie woogie piano players who came out of the lumber and turpentine camps of East Texas, playing the ‘fast western’ style as opposed to the ‘slow blues’ played in New Orleans and St. Louis.

The blues, Campbell writes, are simple and elemental. The European approach to appreciating the blues—which tries to read hidden meanings and mystical expressions and pretentious symbolism into the music—is intellectual mumbo-jumbo. During a conversation in his New York office, the pianist and composer Clarence Williams tells Campbell that commentators often miss the irony and satire in blues music. Songs of sorrow carried ‘a steady, throbbing undertone of hope,’ writes Campbell, and while the people knew tribulation and suffering, there was always a spiritual and ennobling quality to the music.

Otis Ferguson, “Five Pennies”
Otis Ferguson’s chapter in Jazzmen provides a look at jazz in New York City in the 1920s. New York ‘stole the show’ from New Orleans and Chicago and became the center of the jazz world by the ‘sheer weight of its resources’ in band management, song publishing, radio and recording, writes Ferguson. There was no such thing as a New York style, however, since musicians came to town from all over the country for a kind of ‘gathering of the tribes’: Red Nichols was from Utah, Jack Teagarden from Texas, Jimmy Dorsey from Pennsylvania. Jazz bands played a modified Dixieland repertoire, says Ferguson, toned-down with rehearsed effects. The promise of a professional payday stimulated a new level of musicianship; broadcasters and record companies insisted on written arrangements and sight-reading. Big bands grew out of the small band tradition, and New York, ‘with its thousands of customers and dollars,’ made the big bands possible. The originality and spirit in the big bands was low, writes Ferguson, but the technical training was valuable, and many good musicians migrated to the city and found steady pay. A modified, musically sophisticated version of orchestral jazz, as played by the supreme showman Paul Whiteman in an Atlantic City hotel, attracted the attention of phonograph companies and became the ‘new thing,’ abetted by the influence of radio and recording. Whiteman recruited the recently arrived Bix Beiderbecke (Iowa) and Frankie Trumbauer (Missouri) from a pool of talented players, and was promoted as “The King of Jazz.”

Roger Pryor Dodge, “Consider the Critics”
Dodge’s essay helps clarify Robert Goffin’s claim that he was first to pay serious attention to jazz. Could a young Belgian lawyer really have been the first to treat jazz seriously? Was there no one in the U.S. thinking about the music, seriously or otherwise? Of course there was, but Goffin did not have access to works by James Weldon Johnson, J.A. Rogers or Alain Locke, who placed blues, ragtime and jazz in the context of American culture, or the black American press, which debated the merits of the music. (Neither did most white Americans pay much attention to black writers at the time.) What we learn from Dodge is that there were indeed American (and European) commentators on the new phenomenon of jazz music before Goffin, though few knew what to make of it initially, and it took some time before an understanding and appreciation of jazz became apparent in the commentary. There were no jazz critics as such before 1930, says Dodge, but some commentators were open to the sounds of instrumental folk forms in popular music, while others—specialists in symphonic concert music, or racists, or both—were ill-equipped to evaluate the new ‘hot jazz.’ At one end of the spectrum was the not-atypical response of American Mercury editor George Jean Nathan (1919) to the increasing prominence of black musicians:

”The Negro, with his unusual sense of rhythm, is no more accurately to be called musical than a metronome is to be called a Swiss music-box.”

(James Weldon Johnson’s effective rebuke of similar sentiments expressed by a white musician appeared in a 1915 column in The New York Age.)

English music critic Ernest Newman expressed his antagonism to jazz (“a bundle of tricks”) in an April 1930 article for Vanity Fair:
”America is a purveyor of the most dreary, the most brainless, the most offensive form of music that the earth has ever known.”
There were other commentators in the 1920s who were enthusiastic about the new sounds. Dodge credits Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet with ‘visualizing the idea of a style’ before it even materialized. In his 1919 review of a concert by the Southern Syncopated Orchestra featuring Sidney Bechet, Ansermet lauded the difficult arrangements, ‘admirable for their richness of invention, force of accent, and daring in novelty and the unexpected.’ Carl Engel, writing in The Atlantic in 1922, rejected the idea that folk-derived dance music was antithetical to ‘serious art,’ and drew attention to the improvisational skill of jazz musicians. Other jazz enthusiasts considered symphonic jazz a progressive advance over primitive improvisation. Dodge cites Carl Van Vechten as a ‘pioneer discoverer of jazz’ who believed that the ‘worn-out and exhausted forms’ of concert music would be rejuvenated by the ‘rhythms and tunes that dominate the hearts of the people.’ Van Vechten celebrated the ‘vitality’ of Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” over the ‘saccharine bars of so-called art music,’ then forfeited any credibility as a jazz critic (in Dodge’s view) when he praised the “Rhapsody in Blue” concert of Paul Whiteman. (Ishmael Reed inserted Van Vechten into his Jazz Age parody Mumbo Jumbo, as the leader of a Knights Templar remnant determined to stamp out the Jes’ Grew dancing plague).

The Whiteman concert in February 1924, billed as An Experiment in Modern Music, was publicized as the arrival of American folk-art in symphonic form, but Dodge has no patience for the confusion between orchestral jazz and hot jazz. He questions the judgment of Gilbert Seldes, who justified the importance of popular forms in The Seven Lively Arts (1924) but then elevated the Whiteman Orchestra over Negro bands that were ‘indifferent to the conventions of emotional decency.’ Even worse was Henry Osgood, who praised the schmaltzy piano novelties of Zez Confrey in So This is Jazz (1926). Dodge mocks Abbe Niles for his Introduction to W.C. Handy’s Blues Anthology for Piano and Voice (1926), where Niles praised the ‘rowdy, troubled humor’ of “Rhapsody in Blue” but complained about the ‘intolerably monotonous’ rhythm of folk-derived dance music. But the beat is the whole point, says Dodge. He cites approvingly the Englishman Robert Mendl, whose 1927 book The Appeal of Jazz explained how folkloric dance movements had been incorporated into symphonic suites beginning in the 18th century, and so the extension of American Negro folk forms into art music was not only conceivable but inevitable.

Dodge generously allows that the contradictions and inconsistencies in the works of early jazz commentators were also inevitable, given the ambiguous nature of what they were trying to write about. Not until 1930 or so did actual jazz critics appear, those who knew all the heretofore anonymous players by name and could converse on the topic of jazz in its own terms. For Dodge, Robert Goffin, Hugues Panassié and a few others, the American Negro jazz phenomenon was a new beginning; to embrace jazz was to counter the decadence that had overcome both classical music (‘unrhythmic and lifeless’) and popular music (‘sweet to the point of puerility’). Dodge lets Charles Edward Smith (in “Jazz, Some Little Known Aspects,” The Symposium, October 1930), speak for the lot:

”Jazz is universally misunderstood, and the men of jazz have remained obscure; Paul Whiteman developed a symphonic jazz band for concert jazz and Gershwin composed a clever tour de force and the grand misconception was off to a glorious start, generously footnoted by writers none too sure of their material…”

For a handful of enthusiasts, hot jazz was no aberration; it was the artistic extension of authentic folk forms. Polyphonic syncopation and improvisation set jazz apart from other contemporary music; it was not to be confused with popular song or imitation ragtime. ‘Orchestral jazz’ was an oxymoron. For Dodge and the others, the task at hand, already in the 1930s, was to publicize the vitality of ‘real jazz’ against the prevailing misinformation and misinterpretations. Their work helped spark a revival of early jazz styles in the 1940s, but the inevitable evolution of the music eventually made even the hot jazz enthusiasts sound out of sync.

wither the real jazz?
Even as commercial dance music grabbed public attention nationwide, ‘genuine’ jazz survived—as long as there were places to play. Hobson Wilder writes in Jazzmen that, as an extension of folk-musical sources, the jazz language continued to foster remarkable improvisation by those musicians working with the primary forms, and hot jazz was played in speakeasies and ‘jazz traps’ in all the major cities. In New York, none of the white bands, with their polish and precision, were as good as the bands of Fletcher Henderson, but Henderson was known mostly to a limited dance hall audience. Dodgy joints along Fifty-second Street just west of Fifth Avenue, ‘with [their] gaudy signboards outside and bad air inside,’ attracted a clientele of radio and dance musicians, then the enthusiasts looking for the real thing. The availability of liquor helped the draw. The scene flourished until the Depression and the repeal of Prohibition, when out-of-work musicians left, back to Chicago or on to Kansas City, a river city with a substantial Negro population where many musicians were able to work for a weekly wage. During his research for Jazzmen in New Orleans, Charles E. Smith found a mix of old-time musicians and a younger generation steeped in the tradition, struggling to find places to play but determined to preserve the sound of the city.

The early books on jazz codified a history of the music that began in New Orleans, went upriver to Chicago then out to New York, the music evolving along the way from the raggy clamor of street bands to the polyphonic syncopation of the ‘hot’ ensembles to the musically sophisticated orchestral sound of commercial big bands. Paradoxically, though, some of the earliest jazz writers seemed to be treating a musical form that had come and gone. Enthusiasts lamented the passing of a heroic age of real jazz (the 1920s) and regarded contemporary orchestral jazz as a debased form, something that was barely jazz at all. What we can see now is that the themes of authenticity, tradition, innovation and preservation appear in the jazz bibliography from the beginning.
… (más)
 
Denunciada
JazzBookJournal | Feb 9, 2021 |
Wonderful little book with artful writing and great photographs.
 
Denunciada
robhutten | Dec 4, 2005 |

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Obras
5
También por
1
Miembros
86
Popularidad
#213,013
Valoración
4.0
Reseñas
2
ISBNs
8

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