All the boys in all the bands
Kingsley Amis
Columbus Books, £35, pp.280
From the outside the Grove dictionary looks expensive all right, if not quite up to what is surely a lot of money for something under 1,400 pages long, much of it — I have not measured how much — reprinted material. It also looks kind of cheap, with gold and black lettering thrown around a bit on scarlet. (It reached me without dust-jackets.) Well, I suppose a touch of showbiz feel is to be welcomed when it comes to a form of entertainment that 60 years ago, certainly, you would have called an art only if you were French or trying to be funny or clever, and now has over 3,000 courses on it running in music schools and university arts departments. (I think it 15 3,000, but I may be mixing it up with the number of available courses in science fiction, to which something very similar. and nearly as awful, has happened.)
Anyone writing a jazz piece for the non-specialist press had better nail his colours to the mast, or at least declare an uninterest, early on. I seem to have done so already. To me, an element of entertain' ment, of enjoyment, is inseparable froth art, and I find it especially appropriate that it was the aestheticising Rossetti of all people who should once have insisted on the duty of poetry, as of all art, to be as amusing as any other human activity. ,,
Most listeners to jazz (or the ones 1 speak to) found the entertainment begin- ning to depart from the music as it de- veloped some time in the later 1930s. The first record I heard which sounded to meal parts disagreeable, as opposed to merely boring, was Fletcher Henderson, 5 purposefully-titled 'Queer Notions' (1937, I think, though I cannot trace it in Grove). The first 'serious' book on the subject we heard about, Wilder Hobson's American Jazz Music, appeared in 1939. The explo- sion of 'modern jazz', associated with the names of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gilles- pie, after which nothing was ever the same again, is usually traced to 1941. Meanwhile, a world war had started.
These and other dates, events, names, and many a learned musical exposition have been shifted around far too often for anything but a flat assertion here. For whatever reasons, whatever else had gone in, entertainment had gone out. Jazz had stopped being a naïve American form like science fiction or Westerns; it had stopped sounding pleasant and enjoyable because it had begun to lose its links with dancing and singing, the heart of all music. Being so much less complex, it had run through in only 25 years what it had taken serious Western music centuries to use up, or become afraid of being about to use up. But then it — jazz — had had technology to speed its decline, the LP record to break the connection with the three-minute dance-number, film and television for the anti-musical percussion exhibition. (No one with normal hearing will need remind- ing that mere links with dance and song, with mere beat, with mere pitch, are not enough on their own for anything.) I doubt whether many people are cap- able of surveying a survey of such a balkanised, indeed mosaicised, field as `Jazz' has become. I at least am not. All I Can do is look at a couple of the bits I think I know about, see how they do them and leave the reader to surmise how, for Instance, the expert Bert Noglik manages with such 'neglected' (neglected!) East German masters as Gunter Sommer and Ulrich Gumpert.
Fats Waller shall be first. He is the Jazzman as entertainer par excellence, Comic hats and all, everything They hate, guying the words, chitchatting during the other fellows' solos (and his own), being funny, capable of being very unfunny too. His numbers are not so much jazz perform- ances as tiny cabaret turns with his Rhythm, a tight little group that under- stood him perfectly. Nearly half a century after his death his records are constantly requested on radio: they divide significant- ly into Fats and his Rhythm and the Thirties and Forties oldies on Radio 2, and Thomas 'Fats' Waller and his more august Buddies or on solo piano or pipe organ or at least not singing on Radio 3. Grove inevitably stresses the solos, calls him a `significant' organist — I hear him there as a master of the marcando style drowning in treacle. It (Grove) relegates a far livelier, swinging organist, Milt Herth, to a couple of references found in entries on other people.
Significances, influences, importances, developments, schools, breakaways are inevitably the stuff of encyclopaedias, academic courses, manuals, and not, just as inevitably, the stuff of art, or entertain- ment either for that matter. Interestingness is, must be, their overriding interest. This can be seen in detail in the disgracefully offhand entry Grove gives Sidney Bechet. See, he travelled too much to develop a popular following. He had too little com- petition. He was too solitary to exert direct influences. In closer detail: the two sides recommended here from the Noble Sissle 1938 session are '131ackstick' and 'Southern Sunset'. Now, they are probably more `interesting' than the other two, 'Sweet Patootie' and 'Viper Mad'. But anybody who thinks they are better, better enter- tainment, better art, must be tone-deaf, or a fool, or a musicologist.
K. Abe's photograph album, again a little pricey for its size, has 350 photo- graphs, some in colour, of jazz people, mostly in action, mostly from the period 1940-60. The most famous pair has Louis Armstrong in 1944 opposite Dizzy Gilles- pie in the same year. Louis shown in vaudeville garb, coloured derby, waistcoat with brass buttons, check pants, Dizzy in beret, suit, hornrims. Louis is America, entertainment; Dizzy is the world, art. K. Abe sees all this, of course, and no doubt more, but I wonder whether he finds it as sad and final as I do.
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