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.)
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Nowhere is the failure of the negro to exploit his gifts more obvious than in the use he has made of the jazz orchestra; for although nearly every negro jazz band is better than nearly every white band, no negro band has yet come up to the level of the best white ones, and the leader of the best of all, by a little joke, is called Whiteman. The negro’s instinctive feeling for colourful instruments in the band is marked; he was probably the one to see what could be done with the equivocal voice of the saxophone—a reed in brass, partaking of the qualities of two choirs in the orchestra at once. He saw that it could imitate the voice, and in the person of Miss Florence Mills saw that the voice could equally imitate the saxophone. The shakes, thrills, vibratos, smears, and slides are natural to him, although they produce tones outside the scale, because he has never been tutored into a feeling for perfect tones, as white men have; and he uses these with a great joy in the surprise they give, in the way they adorn or destroy a melody; he is given also to letting instruments follow their own bent, because he has a faultless sense of rhythm and he always comes out right in the end. But this is only the beginning of the jazz band—for its perfection we go afield.
We go farther than Ted Lewis, whom Mr Walter Haviland calls a genius. M Darius Milhaud has told me that the jazz band at the Hotel Brunswick in Boston is one of the best he heard in America, and stranger things have happened. The best of the negro bands (although he is dead, I make exception for that superb 369th Hell-fighters Infantry Band as it was conducted by the lamented Jim Europe) are probably in the neighborhood of 140th street and Lenox avenue in New York and in the negro district of Chicago. Many hotels and night clubs in New York have good jazz bands; I limit myself to three which are representative, and, by their frequent appearances in vaudeville, are familiar. Ted Lewis is one of the three; Vincent Lopez and Paul Whiteman are the others. There is a popular band led by Barney Bernie (as I recall the name, perhaps incorrectly) which is an imitation Ted Lewis, and not a good one. Lewis must be prepared for imitators, for he does with notorious success something that had as well not be done at all. He is totally, but brilliantly, wrong in the use of his materials, for he is doing what he cannot do—i.e., trying to make a negro jazz orchestra. It is a good band; like Europe’s, it omits strings; it is quite the noisiest of the orchestras, as that of Lopez is the quietest, and Lewis uses its (and his) talents for the perpetration of a series of musical travesties, jokes, puns, and games. I quote a eulogy by Mr Haviland:[11]
For instance, there is his travesty of the marriage ceremony. To the jazzed tune of the good old classic “Wedding March” Lewis puts a snowy, flower-decked bridal veil on the sleek, pomaded head of the trombone player. He puts it on crooked, with a scornful flip of his slender, malicious hands. Then he leads forward the hardest-looking saxophone player, and pretends to marry “Ham” and “Eggs”—and incidentally draws the correct conclusion as to marriage as it exists in America to-day. Perfect satire in less than three minutes.