The demise of public jazz performance
American and Continental 'hot'
and 'rhythm' clubs spent much of their energy making or sponsoring live jazz.
The British ones were not so interested in this - there is no British equivalent
to the Quintet of the Hot Club of France or the Dutch Swing College Orchestra of
the 'thirties - but they spent a great deal of time discussing jazz and its
social background and history. Indeed, a number of the top
jazz bands that we
work with and who play in the UK for weddings and birthday parties, regularly go
to France and Holland to perform. This is a different business and quite a
different scale of enterprise. Whereas there are a lot of extremely good jazz
bands who only play for corporate events, birthday parties and weddings within
perhaps an hour and a half's drive from where they live, there are not many with
musicians who are full-time enough and have the ability to get on a plane and do
a concert tour in Europe. As one jazz band that we work with, I know one of the
players quite well, who plays in not only the jazz band, that circus bands and
cruise liners, so they have their life organised to be nomadic. A week here, two
months there, and perhaps a year on another project. That's not the sort of
thing that the jazz musician who is perhaps also teaching their local county
education service during the week, and performing with their band at weekends,
could contemplate. Other jazz musicians will live the nomadic lifestyle for a
period of time, but when they have got a wife and the children come along,
lifestyles very often have to change, so being able to play for a wedding
reception or birthday party somewhere within their vicinity, at a weekend, is a
way to continue their art and to earn money from performing as part of their
total income stream.
Similarly when jazz was
developed by the Americans, particularly the black Americans, it may well have
appealed to them because it was their discovery and art, not that of the
upper-class cultured, and one which they could use to earn a living or part of a
living; but it also appealed to them because, thanks to its immediate appeal, it
was an ideal introduction to serious music for people with no previous
qualifications and training. The pioneer jazz fan was therefore culturally
active, energetic, often with ambitions to create: perhaps one reason why
commercial artists, journalists, people on the fringes of the theatrical and
film business were so frequently found in his ranks. A Mr Clifford Kellerby, a
bus conductor, was not at all untypical in his extra-curricular activities: he
played in both jazz and military bands, edited the Leeds Transport Magazine,
drew posters, painted (we owe our information about him to a large, and, alas,
not very successful allegorical symbolic painting on the past, present and
future of jazz) and 'travelled on the Continent'.
Not that the left recognised
the jazz fan as a type; but he was in it all right and gave all jazz made in the
pre-World War II mould a permanent slant to the extreme left.
From the middle 'thirties jazz
began to percolate upwards into higher society, and notably into some of the
public schools and the old universities. An enthusiasm for jazz or the blues was
a respectable eccentricity, but nevertheless neither normal nor socially
particularly cherished
This modest expansion of the
jazz public reflected the vogue for 'swing' which swept the United States after
1935 as well as the political currents of the times. But swing put the older,
and more quintessential, British jazz lovers into a quandary. The jazz community
exists largely, as we have seen, by its exclusive-ness and its hostility to
commercialism. Mr Rex Harris's Pelican Books on jazz still reflect this
attitude, heightened by the later New Orleans fanaticism, with remarkable
accuracy.
It was therefore natural that
the extraordinary expansion of the jazz public which took place everywhere
during the war, was not the direct prolongation of swing, but a reaction against
it: the 'New Orleans Revival'. Out of fifteen leading British 'revivalist'
musicians one (the first of them all) was born in 1917, three in 1920-1, two in
1926 and nine in 1928-32-six of them in 1928-9. All of them came from among the
jazz fans, none from among the professional musicians. The 'revivalist' jazz
bands formed on the outskirts and marched upon the centre of the city, like
rebellious armies deposing Roman emperors. George Webb's Dixielanders raised the
banner of revolt in the Red Barn at Bexleyheath, Kent, in 1944, the 'Crane River
Jazz Band' - nursery of numerous New Orleans prophets - came from Cranford,
Middlesex, while to this day the Jazz Club Calendar of the Melody Maker records
the strongholds of the music in Chadwell Heath and Southall, Croydon and Wood
Green, Baling, Hanwell, Harringay and Dagenham. Soon Leeds produced the
Yorkshire Jazz Band, Manchester the 'Saints' (named after the tune which may
best
Why the Scots have taken to
jazz so much more readily than any other part of Britain is obscure, but the
fact is not in dispute: ever since the early and middle 'thirties they have
provided by far the largest single contingent of good jazz musicians in these
islands.
To judge by the character of
the London fans, the lower-middle-class youth pretty certainly remained the main
pillar of the jazz public.
amateur and semi-professional
musician, and the ordinary inexpert fan, generally of schoolboy or student age.
This kind of simple, non-intellectual music had its appeal to the intellectuals,
not to mention young aristocrats from the gossip-column zone. It is no accident
that revivalist jazz provides the incidental music to John Osborne's Look Back
in Anger, whose hero, it will be remembered, occasionally goes off-stage to
practise the trumpet and once had ambitions to become a jazz trumpeter. Few of
the leading revivalist bands were without some Communists, and several were led
by young men who came out of, or from the neighbourhood of, the small Communist
youth movement, while the International Youth Festivals of 1947-57 were also
international rallies and propaganda platforms for revivalist jazz.
Revivalist bands in Britain
had taken to allowing a guitarist-singer with rhythm accompaniment to sing such
blues and songs (mainly from the Leadbelly repertoire) between band sets: the
arrangement was called 'skiffle', a term dug up from the obscurer recesses of
American jazz history, and virtually without meaning for anyone in the USA. A
taste for the blues had long been part of a sound revivalist approach, though
commercially a hopeless proposition: of all jazz fans, the blues lover has been
the most consistently esoteric. To this day the admirer of Sonny Boy Williamson
or Bessie Jackson, Roosevelt Sykes 'The Honeydripper', or Lightning Hopkins,
must rely on imported and second-hand American records, for it has not been
commercially worthwhile to release a representative selection of blues records
in Britain.
Nobody created or anticipated
the fashion: Mr Lonnie Donegan in Britain, whose Rock Island Line - originally a
African American prison-camp song - exploded into the big time in the spring of
1956, had made the record as part of his routine duties with a leading
revivalist band. Firstly, it was much more patently an outgrowth of the
revivalist jazz movement. Second, it became as much a movement for amateur music
making as for listening; indeed, the largest movement of its kind within living
memory.
Skiffle was unquestionably the
most universally popular music of our generation. Revivalist jazz, as we see,
progressed steadily, and with increasing speed, from minority to majority
status. By the later 'fifties it had virtually ceased to be minority music:
skiffle was triumphant, and even the old-fashioned instrumental jazz of New
Orleans had insensibly turned into popular dance music for youngsters between
fifteen and twenty-five, who, if asked, would have guessed that King Oliver was
the monarch of Denmark. Others fled forward, into the unexplored territories of
'modern' or 'cool' jazz.
Modern jazz had been on the
American and European scene since the middle 'forties. Its sectarian appeal
would no doubt have made itself felt earlier but for two facts: it was much
harder to listen to than the older kind, and the bulk of the established critics
and jazz intellectuals, formed in the school of the 'thirties, were bitterly
hostile to it, for political and social reasons. What they cherished in jazz was
a 'people's music' -that is, both a music which appealed to ordinary people and
which, in its nature, provided an alternative pattern of the arts.
Modern jazz seemed to them to
sell the pass: a jazz version of esoteric avant-garde music might have its own
merits, but they were not the ones they had come to jazz for. In spite of a good
deal of American drum-beating in the later 'forties, 'bop', 'cool' or
'modern'jazz proved incapable of being turned into a widely saleable music.
Modern jazz won itself a public of sorts, drawn partly from among professional
musicians (always ready to appreciate a technically interesting music), partly
from among the various national equivalents of the hipsters and St Germain-type
layabouts, partly from among that stratum of young intellectuals, who, as in
France, are given to accepting anything in the arts which can plausibly claim to
be revolutionary. Among musicians in Britain it often took the form of a vague
malaise, a boredom with the traditionalist music whose limits they felt they had
explored pretty completely, a desire to play something more interesting.
(Characteristically if often took the compromise form of moving from the
'traditional' music of the 'twenties to the 'mainstream' music of the 'thirties
and early 'forties, a half-way house to modernism.) But the trend was
unmistakable, and it was greatly aided by two American developments: the virtual
drying up of the American source of 'traditional' records (except for the
perennial blues), and the swelling stream of modern records which British
companies.
For in the USA modern jazz, by
the middle 'fifties, acquired recognised cultural standing, perhaps because the
line between hipsterdom and intellectual-ism grew faint in the period of
McCarthy and the apotheosis of General Motors. The evolution of the jazz public
is no more finished than that of jazz. It is invariably a predominantly young
public, for jazz, with its capacity to express unequivocal emotions in the most
direct manner and its gallery of potential heroes and symbols is a music ideally
suited to adolescence.
In Britain the core of the
jazz public represented another kind of rebellion, and a more serious one: the
aspirations of the culturally and educationally underprivileged young for
official recognition. It is part of their life at a certain age, like playing
tennis or going camping, or going to espresso bars. There is a wide difference
between the atmosphere of the jazz rebel, with his penchant for low life as much
as for music, and the atmosphere of the characteristic British mass jazz club of
the early and middle 1950s, where nobody drank, or wanted to drink, anything
stronger than Coca-cola, or smoke anything stronger than tobacco, and where the
songs about whores, fancy-men, gamblers and tough men echoed through an
atmosphere which was much less like that of Storyville than like that of an
old-fashioned youth club, minus the organisers. In a way this sort of public was
and is a great deal more like the public jazz was made for than any other. Few
jazz occasions recaptured the New Orleans spirit (as distinct from the New
Orleans environment) better than the 'river-boat shuffles' or 'jazz carnivals'
which came to be organised in Britain in the middle 'fifties: one or two
steamers would be hired to go to Margate and back, a selection of bands playing,
or relays of musicians would play for an Albert Hall filled to the brim with
working-class adolescents having the time of their lives. By aficionado
standards, few of these were serious jazz fans. It was simply that for them jazz
had become what Viennese waltzes were for their grandparents, and shimmies or
foxtrots for their parents: the normal kind of music for dancing and a good
time.
A third form of jazz public
(if it can be so called) has also developed round the original nucleus of the
fans: those who take no particular interest in jazz, but recognise that it has
become part of the cultural scene, and must be treated as such. Jazz has been
slow thus to establish itself, except in the Scandinavian countries where (in
Denmark at least) jazz classes appear to have been organised in schools, and
jazz concerts officially subsidised even in the early 1930s. Even in America
official recognition of the fact that jazz is the most original musical
contribution to civilisation made in that country has been slow. (Fortunately,
for it is very doubtful whether jazz flourishes any more than folk-song in an
atmosphere of academic music schools and seminars or symphony concerts.)
However, little by little the patent appeal of jazz has been reflected in the
institutions of orthodox culture. Jazz reviews have appeared in serious
journals, jazz programmes on serious broadcasts.
THE ATMOSPHERE which has
surrounded jazz almost since the beginning is so overcharged with emotion as to
make it extremely difficult to explain in purely musical terms. The first
English writer to deal seriously, if inadequately, with jazz, R. W. S. Mendl,
observed this as early as 1927. Let us simply consider the extraordinary fervour
which jazz has been able to rouse fairly consistently among its devotees, and
which leads young jazz lovers to treat famous musicians as something like
models, heroes or saints, and more mature ones to leap over the barriers of
non-musical loyalty with astonishing ease. Lt. Dietrich Schulz-Koehn of the
German army spent his war leaves in Paris working on the 1942 edition of M.
Delaunay's Hot Discography, though the French jazz lovers' community was, for
obvious reasons, extremely anti-German. Again, the views of the Soviet
authorities on jazz have been known at least since the middle 1930s.
So far from taking notice of
Russian views, British Communist journals printed serious jazz reviews
continuously even in the worst years of 'Zhdanovism'. Clearly, jazz rouses
remarkably powerful and tenacious emotions among both its supporters and
opponents.
The point is not that the jazz
protests can be fitted into this or that pigeonhole of orthodox politics, though
it often can - mostly into a left-wing one - but that the music lends itself to
any kind of protest and rebelliousness much better than most other forms of the
arts. It is a music for expressing strong feelings of dislike.
This is due, in the first
place, to an element jazz shares, alas, with Tin Pan Alley: it is democratic
music. As the organ of the British popular musicians wrote in one of its first
editorials, at the beginning of a career of consistent and passionate
championship of jazz:
Jazz was originally music
designed to be enjoyed by the least intellectual or expert, the least
privileged, educated or experienced citizen, as well as by others; though the
specialist jazz aficionados have been much more reluctant to admit this than the
players. It was also designed to be played by men who have 'picked it up' any
way. The jazz listener does not require the sort of preparation which is needed
to listen profitably to a fugue, the jazz player can perform without the sort of
training which is needed to sing coloratura, though this does not mean that
either fail to benefit from training. More than this: jazz is a musical
manifesto of populism. The Merry Widow might be the musically modest citizen's
grand opera, but the jazz band, real or pseudo, was in no sense an imitation of
a culturally more ambitious or respectable genre. Loud, raucous, sounding (even
without the pseudo-jazz additions of tin pans, motor horns and funny hats) like
nothing on earth except an undisciplined brass band playing in a room too small
for it, the
It has produced scholarship
and serious critical discussion of art among people whom the orthodox arts could
never bring to this point (except through a training in jazz): audiences whom
gossip columnists contemptuously describe as 'not the most intelligent that have
been seen', who listen, with absolute attention, in absolute silence, and in
their thousands, to what would in orthodox terms be considered a reasonably
difficult chamber-music recital; and what is more, who discuss them as the old
Viennese musical public would discuss the rival merits of Furtwangler and Bruno
Walter. It has come nearer to breaking down class lines than any other art. At
its best the democratic protest of jazz merely means that this music stakes a
claim to a serious participation in the arts for people who would, but for it,
be mostly debarred from such participation; and its appeal for such people is
therefore strong.
It is true that this sort of
philistinism surrounds the jazz-influenced kinds of pop music much more than
jazz itself, whose strict devotees are generally shocked by the prospect of
simply sitting back and enjoying themselves; the critics more than the
musicians. In the second place jazz is a music of protest, because it was
originally the music of an oppressed people and of oppressed classes: of the
latter perhaps more obviously than of the former, though the two cannot be kept
rigidly separate.
In terms of jazz, jazz is good
music because it is believed to derive not simply from African Americans but
from the red-light district of New Orleans.
The emotional, and often quite
irrational, bias in favour of African Americans and African American low life
has always been extremely strong among serious jazz lovers. Politically
left-wing aficionados have attempted to counter it with the argument that jazz
is a people's music of both black and white oppressed.
This bias, especially among
some traditionalist zealots, can reach the point of mania as when one (white)
historian of jazz writes that 'white men cannot even play it', or another argues
that:
'I may say that authentic jazz
can be created only by African Americans; any other jazz by white men... is not
authentic. A good deal of jazz criticism is permeated by less extreme versions
of the same pro-coloured race feeling, and this sometimes affects critical
standards.
Colour prejudice in reverse
(what coloured intellectuals used to call 'Crow Jim') must not be confused with
the obvious recognition, which implies no belief in mysticism or blood, that the
origins and evolution of jazz are more closely linked with the history of
African Americans than with any other group of people, and that up to the
present the supremacy of African American players in jazz is about as obvious
and perhaps even more unchallenged than that of Jews in chess playing. (Of
course it may be argued that this is partly due to the practice of critics,
since about 1930, of establishing the criteria of good jazz in terms of the
achievements of coloured players.
it's unlikely that the role of
coloured Americans in jazz has been exaggerated, for it has not; but that the
appeal of jazz for many white middle-class admirers is that it is a music of
those who, by middle-class ranking, are socially below them. For, paradoxically,
the African American's own musical protest against his fate was one of the less
important elements in the appeal of jazz, and one of the latest to become
influential.
'Unembattled, happy, almost
complacent' is not a bad description of old-style New Orleans jazz. This did not
last, but its influence on white pop music, serious jazz and the jazz public
cannot be described as one of social protest. It is not only their type of music
which speaks directly from and to the ordinary untrained man or woman, in which
people play as men speak, or laugh, or cry, only more so; and which, by virtue
of this directness is a standing protest against the cultural and social
orthodoxies from which it is so sharply distinct. It is any music specifically
made by and for the poor, with however little intention of political protest.
This may be illustrated by the example of an institution which has affinities
with art and, incidentally, has had the most profound influence on the evolution
of jazz, the 'poor man's church'.
Every poor man's Protestant
sect, white or coloured, is essentially a 'ranting' sect, whether it consists of
Durham Primitive Methodists.
Once again these
characteristics appear in their purest form in African American churches, and
may be heard on the invaluable records of their services and music, but they may
equally be found in white ones of whatever nationality, provided these reflect
similar social situations. The parallel of such church services with primitive
jazz is not arbitrary, even if we leave out of account the very close links
between the 'hot-gospelling' African American churches and the rhythmic blues,
which makes a childhood among the Pentecostal Holiness people or the Churches of
Christ so valuable an education for the future jazz musician. Like such
churches, jazz was systematically not like orthodox culture, and exalted the
gifts and ways of untrained and ignorant musicians and dancer-listeners in very
similar ways. The techniques of the hot gospeller in prose, of the gospel
singer in song, and of the improvising soloist in jazz are (as the word 'hot'
implies) fundamentally similar.
The mere fact that it
originates among oppressed and unconsidered people, and is looked down upon by
orthodox society, can make the simple listening to jazz records into a gesture
of social dissent; perhaps-as generations of teenagers have discovered - the
cheapest of all such gestures. What they would do if jazz were ever to become
domesticated and officially accepted, like ballet, makes for entertaining
speculation.
My object has been to show,
not why people require some way of making musical protests, or blowing off
steam, but why, having these requirements, they should find jazz so eminently
suitable. If jazz had not been on the American scene, some other form of the
American popular tradition would unquestionably have come to take its place as a
vehicle for protest, though hill-billy songs, cowboy music, or the vigorous and
'democratic' products of the early, half-folky Tin Pan Alley, would not have
made perfect substitutes. For jazz owes at least this to its African American
origins and associations, that it is not merely 'common people's music', but
common people's music at its most concentrated and emotionally powerful.
Because the musical language
of jazz is Afro-American, it is more heterodox, and owes less even to the echoes
of orthodoxy than other kinds of popular music. Moreover, because of its musical
origins, it has used that most potent of musical devices for inducing powerful
physical emotion, rhythm, as no other music familiar to our society has. What
jazz protests about or against is, for our purposes, secondary. Jazz by itself
is not politically conscious or revolutionary. The origins of jazz lay among
that section of the poor which, though extremely oppressed, is least given to
collective organisation and political consciousness, and which finds its
'freedom' by side-stepping oppression rather than by facing it: the unskilled,
pre-industrial, big-city labouring poor. Being poor and oppressed, they sing and
play about poverty and oppression as a matter of course. Folk-song experts of
the left have never had any difficulty in discovering flamenco songs expressing
bitter hatred of policemen and judges, Neapolitan ballads idealising
brigand-rebels, or blues of left-wing social significance.
It is the critics who have
classified secular jazz and blues and the gospel song under the same heading:
historically and socially the 'gospel people' among the African Americans have
been strongly opposed to jazz and all it stood for, many jazz musicians and
blues singers resentful and contemptuous of church groups. In much the same way
the labour movements of Britain have generally been un-enthusiastic about the
old music halls, while the old music hall artists, in spite of their marked
prejudice for the poor against the rich, were rarely political militants. The
old British contrast between the 'pub miner' (who was, more often than not, the
less organised type) and the 'chapel miner' (who provided the cadre of union
organisers) has its less formalised parallels in the world of jazz. Few
politically militant African Americans were genuine admirers of jazz, at least
until it had been borne in upon them (often by the propaganda of white
intellectuals) that this music was 'an achievement of the race' of which African
Americans should be proud.
It was easy to associate jazz
with radical and revolutionary politics, and in times of political ferment
American jazz musicians were quite willing so to be associated: after all, if
the poor, however unorganised and demoralised, have any politics, they must be
'on the side of the poor'. (In other countries, where the jazz movement had
different social bases and
Very many American jazz
musicians have expressed hatred and resentment of an unjust society, if only
privately.
What jazz is against may be
reasonably clear in theory, though it may find only a rather passive, evasive
and individualist expression outside music. There is the excuse that African
American jazz musicians are much more easily victimised than white popular
entertainers who have made a great deal of money.
The yearning for official
recognition is perhaps the most dangerous part of this temptation, because it
affects not only the general appeal of jazz but also the music. It has always
existed, even when the jazz players were perfectly content to blow out their
souls as ordinary entertainers of a popular dancing audience, and the fans most
vociferous in their contempt for the 'long-hair' arts. It is this which has
caused jazz musicians of all styles time and again to insist on playing with
string sections (for violins symbolise accepted cultural status in music), in
spite of the uniformly disastrous results of such experiments. The film St Louis
Blues, which, like so many American films, is a compendium of widely accepted
fictions, one more miserable than the next, illustrates this very clearly: like
the film about Louis Armstrong's world tour, it ends in the apotheosis of jazz
being played in a Philharmonic auditorium by a lot of fiddlers. The rebels of
the arts in jazz settle for admission to their version of the Royal Academy,
unlike the rebels in more sophisticated arts, who have learned better.
Similarly, jazz lovers in both Britain and America have shown quite
disproportionate resentment against the neglect of their music by the guardians
of orthodox sounds. Generations of them have grown up to repeat the same rare
crumbs of praise for jazz by classical musicians (first- or second-rate), and to
hail with touching gratitude the occasional recognition of jazz by the Third
Programme of the BBC or similar established cultural institutions.!
That intelligent impresario
Norman Granz knew what he was about when he baptised his touring jazz show Jazz
at the Philharmonic. Few books about jazz fail to begin with, or to contain, a
defence of jazz against its detractors.
This feeling of inferiority,
whether acknowledged or not, has been part of the jazz protest. It has produced
such phenomena as the attempt to turn jazz into something equivalent to
'straight music' - the 'symphonic jazz' of the 1920s, the devices lifted from
Bach and Milhaud in modern jazz, the dressing up in morning coats and
acknowledging applause by stiff bows, the systematic refusal to behave in any
way like an old-fashioned extrovert entertainer. Paradoxically, it is the
simplest and least 'political' jazz which has best resisted the temptations of
compromise, respectability and official recognition. Bessie Smith, who never
sang in white theatres and would not have changed her style if she had, is -
like the blues - the least corrupted and corruptible part of jazz, and therefore
the purest carrier of the jazz protest. (It may be significant that of all the
biographies and autobiographies of jazz artists, those of the women singers
express the irreconcilable bitterness of the underdog most persistently. Often,
indeed, the primitive and elemental musicians are far more willing than the
sophisticated and emancipated ones to play what the public wants or to act as
the public wants them to act. If Armstrong were to play the Purcell Trumpet
Voluntary, it would still come out like the blues.