 Jazz: I Was Born with Music in Me
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Jazz in New York
The success of the white Original Dixieland Jazz Band, who took New York by storm in 1917, inspired imitators. Some combined novelty effects.
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Jazz owes much to the district where George and Ira Gershwin and Irving Berlin started their careers. The wise-cracking brand of humor, and much language which has become part of popular speech, have roots in the Lower East Side. Such expressions as gabfest, plunderbund, it listens well, bum, dumb (in the sense of stupid), come from the Germans; the Jews have given words like kibitzer, kosher, mazuma, phooey; and the Irish, shillelagh, smithereens, ballyhoo, and shehang.
The district's environment has influenced Jimmy Durante, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Fannie Brice, George Jessel, Lionel Stander, Milton Berle, and the Marx brothers. Immigration quotas at the beginning of the 1920's brought a great change to the district. No longer maintained by new arrivals, the population dropped from well over a half million in 1920 to less than a quarter million in 1938.
The object of condemnation, collectively known as jazz, included various related styles: the "raggy" music of white New Orleans musicians such as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and their imitators (music that was itself a limited imitation of the black music most closely associated with the Crescent City), the syncopated dance bands, the Charleston craze, the songs of George Gershwin or Irving Berlin, and the "symphonic" jazz of Paul Whiteman.
Equal censure was not applied to them all, but at the start of the decade at least few distinctions were made. Esthetic criticism ranged from the sardonic (Thomas Edison said he preferred jazz records played backwards) to the loftily dismissive. Moral criticism was more strident: jazz, savage, primitive, appealing to the basest instincts, rotted moral fiber, spread a whorehouse culture, polluted children, caused illegitimacy and all manner of unspeakable crimess.
A Ladies Home Journal article of August 1921 revealed the phobia that lay at the root of the antagonism: "Jazz originally was the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer, stimulating the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds."
In 1928 Warner Brothers released a new film -- Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer. 37 Science had brought together sight and sound: here was the talkie. There had been several prior talking pictures, but the great success of The Jazz Singer marked the turningpoint. Within a year their conquest of the silent film was complete.
There were other reasons for the attack, among them the confusion felt in small-town America over the rapidly changing morality of the big cities. At their core was a perceived threat to white Anglo-Saxon supremacy which found in the sensualism of black America the obverse of all its cherished self-images, and heard in jazz the approaching menace of physical and mental defilement.
The tempo of New York City, the counterbeats of jazz music, the hieroglyphs of public signboards and lettering, the shrieks of thoughtless color in our streets-these had nourished an inner imaginative life. Those enticed by the new music reacted in the opposite way to the same perception. Beneath the romantic image of freedom from convention, of individual self-gratification in a return to a more instinctual life, lay stereotypes of black culture as "primitive", sensual and culturally naive. Even among those few members of white society who were familiar with "rea!" jazz and blues, the fascination of discovery was tinged with paternalism and exoticism.
To these stereotypes of black America were added others; the threat posed by the former slave was complemented by that offered by the more recent immigrant. White ethnic groups had mediated earlier in the popularization of black- derived dances, and they now contributed to the dissemination of jazz. Jewish songwriters such as Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, who had previously been bracketed with ragtime composers, were now included under the new label; the phenomenal success of their music, and in particular of Gershwin's attempt to blend jazz-derived rhythms and sounds with classical techniques in his Rhapsody in Blue (1926), caused constemation among some cultural guardians. This was not attributable solely to concem for the musical tradition being challenged; the threat was also one of blood, all the more ominous because the music symbolized an alliance between the erstwhile marginal groups of Jews and blacks.
Among songwriters, Gershwin was one of those most dearly interested in Afro-American music. Most interesting of the white ethnic performing musicians who gathered around jazz were the Chicago-based players, influenced by both black and white New Orleans musicians.
Responding in a way that would be echoed in the fifties by many young whites as they encountered rhythm & blues, Bix Beiderbecke, Mezz Mezzrow, Hoagy Carmichael and others behaved as they did in embracing a new-found way of life that offered an escape from the constraints of their own inherited culture.
Miles Davis' popularity was so great that he mistakenly received composer credit for a number of modern jazz standards such as Blue in Green, Tune Up and Four. He had a great artistic gift for creating music. Davis was one of the very few jazz musicians of the 20th century. When Miles played a tune it became part of his soul and it never lost character.
Popular music now enjoyed an importance in the debate about culture that was probably without parallel. One has to look back as far as the controversy which raged in 18th-century New England over congregational singing styles to find anything like a precedent. That argument had derived, fundamentally, from the dash of literate and orally based cultures. In the 1920s the players had changed and the plot was more complex, but the underlying antithesis was the same.
"I was born with music inside me. That's the only explanation I know of," Ray Charles said in his autobiography, "Brother Ray." ." "Music was one of my parts ... like my blood. It was a force already with me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me, like food or water."
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