In the past few years the line of development of most of our revues and musical shows has been clearly marked; the bad old days were slowly forgotten and whatever was suggestive had to become subtle; and gradually, as the surface polish grew brighter, the suggestive humours underneath were forgotten; our revues became denatured in more senses than one. There is one risqué moment in the whole of a recent Follies, and that is one more than usual. The twittering about love and a kiss goes on; but the Great Reality of Sex is (quite properly, I am sure) forgotten. And in an encore stanza of He May Be Your Man, But He Comes to See Me—Sometimes, as sung at the Plantation, the whole conventionalized fabric of our popular love songs was flung aside and the gay reality exposed. This amorous frankness is part of a simple realism—a sophisticated realism couldn’t occur in a musical show, unless in the manner of Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène. It is a fitting counterpart to the exaggerated postures, the slightly lubricious gestures and movements, of the dance. Another simplicity, and a very good one, is in such a song as that about a dog from Tennessee in Oh, Joy—a song which with that one quality, and against indifferent music and unexceptional words, broke up the show.
Behind the frankness and the violence and the simplicity there is found the most important factor of all—the music. And behind that stands a figure exceedingly attractive and, in its tragedy, almost moving, that of the late Jim Europe. Of the music itself—of jazz and the use of spirituals and the whole question of our national music—this is clearly not the place to write. One wishes to mention a name or two: Shelton Brooks, least habile of pseudo-Balieffs, wrote long ago The Darktown Strutters’ Ball, which ought not to be forgotten; Creamer and Layton composed all of Strut, Miss Lizzie, and therein appeared Sweet Angeline, as complex a piece of syncopation as Mr Berlin ever composed. What portion of Shuffle Along was composed by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake I do not know, but Sissle in action and Blake at the piano were wholly satisfying and expert. And all of these composers, and all of the jazz bands who play for them, have the ineffable advantage of being assured, in advance, of dancers who in fancy or straight dancing have the essential feelings for rhythm and broken rhythm in their bones.
And that interior response to syncopation Jim Europe had to the highest possible degree. He had been, before the war, the band leader at the Castles’; I am told by one who knows of such matters that his actual vogue was passing when the war came. He returned with the 369th U. S. Infantry “Hell-Fighters” Band and for a few Sunday nights in March, 1919, he packed the old Manhattan Opera House to the doors.
Say that what he played had nothing to do with music; say that to mention the name of a conductor in the same breath with his name is an atrocity of taste—I cannot help believing that Jim Europe had the essential quality of music in him, and that, in his field, however far from any other it may have been, he was as great as Karl Muck in his. He did have contrast; it was out of the contracting stresses of a regular beat and a divergent that he created his effects. The hand kept perfect time, and his right knee, with a sharp and subtle little motion, stressed the acceleration or retard of the syncope. His dynamics were beautiful because he knew the value of noise and knew how to produce it and how to make it effective; he knew how to keep perfectly a running commentary of wit over the masses of his sound; and the ease and smoothness of his own performance as conductor had all the qualities of greatness. He rebuked a drummer in his band for some infraction of discipline and was killed.
Whatever the negro show has to give to the perfected Broadway production has its sources fairly deep in the negro consciousness, and I put Jim Europe forth as its symbol because in him nearly all that is most precious came to the surface. He seemed sensitive to the ecstasy and pathos of the spirituals as he was to the ecstasy and joy of jazz. He was, as conductor, vigorous and unaffected and clean. In Shuffle Along, Messrs Sissle and Blake paid honour to his memory, but the unacknowledged debt of the others is greater. I am inclined to think that, if sterility does not set in for the more notable Broadway product, it will be because something of what Jim Europe had to give has been quintessentialized by his successors and adopted.
Plan For a Lyric
Theatre in America
PLAN FOR A LYRIC THEATRE IN AMERICA
I am going to establish a lyric theatre in America. Not an art theatre and not a temple of the drama, and not an experimental theatre. A lyric theatre where there will always be Mozart and Jerome Kern and Gilbert-and-Sullivan and Lehar—and NEVER by any chance Puccini or the Ring or Ibsen. I shall avoid the good things and the bad alike in the serious forms; I shall have Russian Ballets and American ballets. The chief thing is that it will be a theatre devoted to all the forms of light musical entertainment and to nothing else. My theatre will put an end to those disheartening revivals (or resurrections) of popular musical shows because the shows will be kept alive, just as “grand” operas are kept alive by appearing in a repertory. Into the repertory I shall incorporate—as soon as their independent existence is at an end—such successes as The Night Boat and such failures as The Land of Joy. There will never be a chance for fashion to destroy things essentially good. I shall produce new pieces, too; and if they are good they will run along with frequent presentations until they are absorbed in the general scheme. And I think I shall have pastiches frequently—of revues and topical productions which aren’t, as entireties, capable of continuing.