From 'Basin Street to Bermondsey
BY KINGSLEY AMIS IN common with most art-forms at any given stage of their development, jazz today stands at the crossroads. I can' not help knowing that if it stays there in perpetuity rooted to the spot, or even gibbeted, a lot of people will remain largely unmoved. The intellectual who is moved falls under the suspicion, not always unjust, of irresponsible faddism, of needing a shot in the arm against collapse through enervation, of enjoying thinking how much he hates Mozart while tapping his foot to the music of Mr. Ken Colyer. It would be a pitY if this understandable prejudice were to obscure the rapidlY increasing and not wholly disreputable part jazz is taking in our national life. I feel, too, that some of our cultural diagnos- ticians could do worse than to try listening to the kind of music that gets played in their favourite research areas, and to test for themselves whether it is capable of interesting a rational being. If you.are going to use phrases like 'mass culture' or 'dance-hall civilisation,' you ought to be able to distinguish between the 1/Icrseysippi Jazz Band and Mr. Geraldo.
A short course of such study would at least teach an inquirer what jazz is not. The tirst thing that it is not, I need hardlY say, is popular vocal music of the kind uttered, with such unmanning readiness, by Mr. Johnnie Ray or Miss Alma Cogan. Nor is it an essentially commercial thing, which means that most of its performers would go on playing in the same way regardless of whether anyone recorded, broadcast or danced to them; the great part of British jazz is, in fact, played by spare-time musicians. Nor is it, nowadays, a field where only American performers excel. Having gone so far, an inquirer might be prepared, if not to define jazz, then to attempt a distinction between its various modes. Here he would need expert assistance of a kind provided by two recent books.* Mr. Albert J. McCarthy's compilation, which veers rather wildly between sound scholarship and the egotistical sublime— it includes for good measure some photographs of the wave' forms produced by the late Tricky Sam Nanton's trombone— is mainly for the post-graduate student, though the reader of more general culture will find here and there in it a genuine critical concern and a significant desire to establish an agreed terminology. Hear Me Ta'kin' To Ya consists of hundreds of contributions, many of them oral in the first instance, from musicians living and dead. The result is a remarkably compre- hensive and readable history of jazz, together with, much material for the social archivist.
Any glance round the jazz scene cannot fail to light upon the baneful figure of the extreme traditionalist, whose literary counterpart is the Aristotelian pedant of the Tudor and Stuart periods. Classical authority, the practice of the ancients, 'who are and ought to be our masters,' spoke no more loudly to Rymer than it speaks now to the man for whom jazz came to an end in 1923 without ever having moved outside the citY limits of New Orleans, La. In his view, Mr. Louis Armstrong has always been impossibly decadent and late; the trulY righteous trumpeter must have been Buddy Bolden, who went mad in 1914. Since Bolden and his fellow-giants passed from view without having made a single gramophone record, the out-and-out classicist is driven away from music and towards * JAZZBOOK 1955. Edited by Albert J. McCarthy. (Case11, 12s. 6d.) HEAR ME TALK1N' To YA. Edited by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoi. (Peter Davies, 18s.) meditation. A related but more moderate standpoint regards the true jazz style as having survived in the recorded work of a large circle of old-time Negro musicians, some recently dead, some still living. I do not myself much like this style, finding its exponents technically incompetent, limited in ideas and dependent on repetition to an almost obsessive degree. It was all these things when it crossed the Atlantic just after the war and became the basis of a great deal of British jazz.
Like most imitators, our revivalist musicians tended to swallow accident as well as essence. The practice of the ancients excluded the use of the piano and the saxophone, no doubt because the former was troublesome and expensive to move and the latter was missing from the great congeries of second- hand instruments which started jazz on its way : the bought-up stock of the old Confederate military bands. Piano and saxo- phone are out, then, and for similar reasons the cornet is sometimes regarded as more pious than the trumpet. Con- sidering all this, the progress made by our revivalists is im- pressive. Native good sense, perhaps, saved them from the puristic excesses of a French group I pnce heard on record, where efforts had clearly been made to produce as pre-electric a sound as possible, even to the inclusion of a kind of echoless pop-gun to imitate the striking of a wood-block in a primitive studio.
By whatever route, British revivalist jazz has come to the point where it may begin to surpass its model. Some recent records of groups headed by Mr. Chris Barber and Mr. Humphrey Lyttelton (though here the approach has been some- what different) compare very favourably with genuine Negro music, and Miss Ottilie Patterson, a former Belfast art student, is the superior of most blues singers I have heard on records. This, to be sure, is an unlikely thing t6 have happened. It ought to be trite that the Negro, having invented jazz, must always play it better ' than his white colleague, and that Americans of either colour must always surpass Europeans. I do not believe these propositions; to the second in particular I might add that European jazz as a whole shows signs of branching off from its origins and developing on lines of its own. This is most perceptible, I gather from one of Mr. McCarthy's contributors, in Sweden, at any rate as regards the so-called modernist mode. In France, a sort of Brahms v. Wagner battle is being waged by two leading critics and their followers, audiences are badly behaved, and the revivalist clubs are marred by a 'phoney existentialist atmosphere,' but again modernist prospects are good. Britain is less to the fore here, though possessing, in that of Mr. Ted Heath, the best large band in Europe.
Modernist jazz, earlier known as be-bop or cool jazz, is the main spearhead of the anti-revivalikt movement. It began, partly as a highbrow Negro fad, with its own existentialist- type uniform of leopard-skin jacket, beret, smoked glasses and goatee beard, and was based musically upon a weariness with hot jazz and swing formulas, especially the unenterprising harmonic structure of that repertoire. The mode also has a non-musical origin in, of all things, the greatly improved status of the Negro in post-war America. Mr. McCarthy, who is the Dryden of jazz critics, makes the interesting suggestion that traditional jazz has become coupled, in the mind of the educated Negro, with the whole miserable apparatus of Uncle Tom and Jim Crow which brought it to birth. There can be few more decisive musical ways of rejecting all that than to produce a 'new sound' by complicating the harmony so that the chord changes at every beat of a fast 4/4, and entitling the result Ideology, Confirmation, Dexterity or Quash/lotto; the Oop Bop Sh'Banz type of modernist title seems to be losing favour. To this pair of ears the new sound has that apparent arbitrariness that warns the non-musician of the presence of musicians' music, but doubt is cast on this by the immense popularity, among British lay audiences and record-collectors, of the cool idiom.
Alongside the modernist school stands the progressive school, originally a white-American venture, which employs a large orchestra and some tricks from musica seria in concert music derived from Mr. Duke Ellington rather than from Rhapsody in Blue. Although it has its sect of 'discophile' supporters over here, it has few analogues in actual perform- ance apart from the comparatively distant one of the Heath band. The other main anti-revivalist mode is that of rhythm and blues, best known to British ears through the records of the 'fabulous alto' (sc. saxophone) of Mr. Earl Bostic., This is Negro music which has managed to throw a sufficient dis- guise over its origin. The means by which this is achieved, in fact the whole corpus of devices used, is lacking in any subtlety. I must say that this commends rhythm and blues to me, and I am evidently far from alone in this, although Great Britain has yet to produce a 'Nadul horn' that can approach Mr. Bostic's or a blues-shouter in this idiom comparable with Mr. H-Bomb Ferguson. Complacency at the hopeful outlook for British jazz—complacency at anything, come to that—can best be purged by playing the Bostic Flamingo on the gramophone. In the intervals of avoiding a sub-arachnoid hxmorrhage, the listener will do well to reflect that America has something to teach us yet.
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