The Jivers
Later I turned my attention to those who could not be said to have just come to listen to the music : the two or three dozen couples who were dancing in a small rectangle at the centre of the room. The extent to which they were outnumbered and the preoccupation of everyone else with what the band was doing made their abandon look slightly pathetic. These condi- tions, together with many more, were repeated at the other establishments I visited and,from now on I shall speak in the main of this and the others as one. It was explained to me several times over that there are different styles of jive dancing, but to my unschooled eye the only marked difference was between some young West Indians I saw, who I thought did it well, and everybody else, who I thought did it not so much badly as with a faintly ludicrous effect. I can't account for this difference, not being disposed to credit Negroes with innate superiority over whites in any jazz matters, but 1 felt it was there. The bobbing, whirling and kicking of the white girls, the prestissinzo shuffling, the mechanical advancing and retreating, the protruded rumps of the white men affected me exactly like some film, speeded up on modern projectors, of an authentic Charleston, which in other respects than tempo tls greatly resembled, and from which, minus the kicks and so on, it is I believe actually derived. 1 experienced not laughter but discomfort and an impulse to look away. This 1 resisted, studying facial expressions, and found blankness, or more charitably a serious intensity, to be the overriding pattern here. It was not a particularly sexy performance; no more so, at any rate, than any other type of physical exertion in mixed company, and far less so than many kinds of ballroom dancing. What we had here, it was easy to see, was an exhibition of skill and satisfaction in its exercise. Never at any time did partners change during dances, and not often between them. I was told that within the various fixed styles there were many individual variations which took time to learn and establish; it was therefore usual, my informant said, for a girl to have a regular dancing-partner who might or might not be her steady boy-friend. I could believe this.
It might be instructive, I suppose, to wonder about the kind of people the dancers and listeners were. To start with, they were nearly all young, under thirty for the most part; it was to be expected that the downward limit of age would be much less easy to fix, though it would be quite inaccurate to talk of 'a teenage audience.' Circumstances were against my making any full-dress field survey of occupations, but a random sample suggested to me that manual trades were thinly represented and that here was an arena of the lower middle classes. Clerk, commercial artist, typist, window-dresser, architect's assistant, laboratory worker, local government employee—these seemed typical, though perhaps to be loosely interpreted in view of the common habit of giving one's job its most flattering name : the architect's assistant, I suppose, might only assist him by sharpening his pencils and making his tea. More common than any of these was the status of student—art student, medical student, science student and just student. 'Art' and 'artist' were terms often used, and more than one person I asked to describe the clientele summed it up as 'mostly arty types.' This phrase was delivered in a neutral or even approbative tone that would greatly have cheered any cultural diagnostician, supposing one to have been at my side. A look at the styles of dress would have provided further encouragement. The outlandish was not in vogue. The girls stuck mainly to jumpers and skirts of conservative pat- tern; the men went in for two-piece ..suits or tweed jackets with corduroy or barathea trousers. Drainpipe slacks (female) and an occasional long-sleeved pullover with decorative inlay (male) were to be seen, but few of these young people would have looked much out of place in, say, the refectory of a provincial university. Of the element of male display—snazzy ties, gigantic shirt-collars or styled hair-does, so familiar in some kinds of dance-hall—there was no hint.
I have said a good deal about facial expressions, but should like to add a word on facial ornament. Female make-up looked restrained to me, though I must admit that thelighting in some of the places I visited was not good. A more sinister note was struck by the plethora of beards (I mean, of course, beards on male faces) that I saw, but I recognise that beards are an open question. These may well have been student beards, which are in a class by themselves; alternatively, they may have been inspired by student beards, or `rather under- graduate beards, and this would fit in with other impressions I gained. The undergraduate still retains a very potent and widespread influence on 'sartorial and quasi-sartorial matters, like beards. A social history of, for instance, the duffel-coat (which I saw encasing many of those entering and leaving the clubs) would, I think, illustrate this. It would be unnecessary to look for undergraduate example as formative of general jazz-club demeanour. This, in conversation at any rate, or in the various queues, was sober in all senses and consistently polite. I looked in vain for the built-in sneer, listened in vain for the loud hectoring laugh, which distinguish the corner-boy. And I might add here that the canoodling I saw going on in the smaller and dimmer-lit places was sporadic, mild; a product more of dance-fatigue than of amouresness.
No, there is no doubt about it. The music is the thing. Even the dancers claimed this; they bought records of the bands they danced to; they would not go anywhere, however ideal the dancing conditions, where the music was below standard. This is probably less rigorous than it sounds. Enthusiasm, as I said earlier, was often uncritical. A closing tutti notable merely for volume, a lamentably oily alto saxophone, a cornet apparently able only to play the key-note, a truly dreadful 'skiffle and blues' session presenting a sort of cockney Georgia, all evoked the kind of response associated with Melba's farewell. But, you know, I don't think it matters much. Those for whom Humph or Ken or Cy can never turn in a lousy solo probably do not much outnumber those for whom old you-know-who could never turn out a lousy novel or poem. And, if anybody is interested, there are several magazines, in particular the admirable Jazz Monthly, which point to the existence of a fairly contentious discrimination somewhere or other. And, without saying what it is more important than, I will say that enjoyment is important. This is a truth readily acknowledged in a context of literature or serious music, but liable to be overlooked when the field shifts to jazz, especially to its public performance. Those who are unwilling to turn their eyes in this direction, or to admit that jazz could ever play a worthy part in people's lives, are likely to be suffering from the discovery that culture is no longer the exclusive club it used to be such fun to belong to.
They come to listen to the music. They stand for hours in conditions of acute discomfort in a smallish room with blank walls, or in a big room where one might well prefer the walls to be blank, decorated as these are with murals that, under a patina of cigarette-smoke, recall those landscape targets the Army used to use for weapon-training. And they enjoy it. I enjoyed it too, of course, but it was rather like watching three rugger internationals in succession. Too old, I mumbled to myself as I staggered up the steps; too out of condition, too fond of comfort. I feel a rather shameful sense of relief now when I lower my back into my armchair, having arranged a good fat cylinder of shellac on my auto-change radiogram, the controls of which permit the lowering as well as the raising of volume. The needle swings into the first groove. It is Humph again, blowing as well as ever, but sounding somehow less immediate. One of these days I must help myself to a medical check-up, a camp-stool and a bottle of benzedrine, and go down those stairs again.
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