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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]
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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.
George Gershwin