Part 5

The moment Hawaii faded out nothing was left but the South, and here the music began to drive the words with a hard hand and a high check. An observer unfamiliar with the nature of ragtime would conclude that the American people had a complex about nigger mammies and that the sublimation thereof was in the popular song. The true explanation is simpler. The mother element is, of course, a sure-fire hit in the pictures and in song; but the nigger mammy enters for the same reason as cotton fields and pickaninnies and Georgia--because our whole present music is derived from the negro and most composers of popular songs haven’t yet discovered that the musical structure is applicable to other themes as well. (George Gershwin’s _Walking Home with Angeline_ in _Our Nell_, Cole Porter’s _Blue Boy Blues_, about the Gainsborough painting, and Berlin’s _Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil_ are examples of the transfer successfully accomplished, and gratifying, too. Best of all is _Limehouse Blues_, by Philip Braham, a veritable masterpiece in the _genre_.) There exist a number of natural themes--slavery, the local scene (Swanee River), the cabin, the food, and the train whereby one arrives. The genius of Tin Pan Alley has worked upon this material, and in both words and music has been amazingly imitative, uninventive, and dull. Yet the idea of taking a theme and so handling it that the slightest variation from the preceding use of the same material shall give the effect of novelty and freshness is a sound one--we know from the history of Greek drama. Alas! there was little novelty and the tradition was never firm enough to bear what they did to it. Yet they had their reward, if they can accept it vicariously, for one of them, not at the beginning and not at the end, which is not yet, took the old material and fashioned a great song. His name is George Gershwin and the song which, before the blue-jazz age, achieves pre-eminence is _Swanee_. To have heard Al Jolson sing this song is to have had one of the few great experiences which the minor arts are capable of giving; to have heard it without feeling something obscure and powerful and rich with a separate life of its own coming into being, is--I should say it is not to be alive. The verse is simple and direct, with faint foreshadowings of the subtly divided, subtly compounded elements of the chorus where the name “Swanee,” with a strong beat, long drawn and tender, ushers in the swift passages leading to the repetition, slow again, of the name; and the rest of the song is the proper working out of a problem in contrasting cadences, and in dynamics. After the chorus, and in another key, there is a coda, a restatement of the theme with a little more restraint, and then, surprisingly and gratefully, for the first time the introduction of the final bars of _Swanee River_. I analyze this song as if it could be taken apart and the essence of it remain; the truth is that it bears inspection and is worth inspection because it has a strongly individual quality, a definite personal touch. Mr Gershwin has progressed[7] in his technical handling of syncopation, as in _Innocent Ingénue Baby_ (not primarily a song to be sung or for the dance, but to hear; it is musically the solution of a problem in pauses, and the answer is delicious); but in _Swanee_ he is at his highest point, for he has taken the simple emotion of longing and let it surge through his music, he has made real what a hundred before him had falsified. He should “do it again.”

_Swanee_ was popular, but by no means as popular as _Some Sunny Day_, a song by Mr Berlin which will simply not bear analysis. I hold Mr Berlin to be still the foremost writer of popular music in spite of it. Three years and a masterly technique separate the two songs and _Some Sunny Day_ is devilishly clever, but most of it isn’t properly singable. It is a good dance tune; analyzed, it resolves itself into a weak treatment of _Old Black Joe_ (clever Mr Berlin to take the first bar of the old _verse_ for the first bar of his _chorus_) and a regrettable quotation again of _Swanee River_. The arrangement is neat, and the inversion of the first bar halfway through the chorus, when the song has dribbled into meaningless fragments, has lost all intensity and is suddenly revived and refreshed, while the words of the first bar are repeated--that sufficiently indicates the master hand. The words are among Mr Berlin’s weakest and it is hard to believe that at the same moment he was revelling in the two _Music Box Revues_, in _Say It With Music_ and _Pack Up Your Sins_, which are superb.

It is not entirely an accident that a consideration of the effect of ragtime on popular song begins and ends with Irving Berlin. For as surely as _Alexander’s Ragtime Band_ started something, _Pack Up Your Sins_ is a sign that it is coming to an end. For this tremendous piece of music simply cannot be sung; it baffled the trained chorus on its first appearance, it can hardly be whistled through, and, although the words are good, they aren’t known. Ragtime is now written for jazz orchestra; three phrases occupy the time of two; four, five, and even six notes the time of two or three. The words which are becoming wittier than ever are too numerous, too jostled, to be sung, and the melodic structure with arbitrarily changing beat baffles the voice and the mind as much as it intrigues the pulse and the heel. The popular song and the ragtime song are vanishing temporarily. But something terrible and wonderful has already taken their place. Already there is an indication of how they will return and--I am tired of speaking of Mr Berlin, but I can’t help it--Mr Berlin has indicated how and where. His _All by Myself_ is in essence a combination of the sentimental song with ragtime--so it was sung by Ethel Levey. And it is played with enthusiasm by jazz orchestras--a perceptible pleasure is ours from recognizing something entirely simple and sentimental weaving its way through those recondite harmonies.

If the song returns in any way the ancient protest against its vulgarity will also return, and it is worth making up our minds about it now. The popular song takes its place between the folk song and the art song. Of these the folk song hardly exists in America to-day: _Casey Jones_ and _Frankie and Johnny_ are examples of what we possess and one doesn’t often hear them sung along country roads or by brown-armed men at the rudder in ships that go down to the sea. The songs of the Kentucky mountains (English in provenance) and the old cowboy songs are both the object of antiquarian interest--they aren’t as alive as the universal _Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here_ or _We Won’t Go Home ’til Morning_. If we refuse to call our ragtime folk music, then we must face the fact that we are at a moment in history when folk songs simply do not occur. (Even the war failed to give us very much; it is interesting to note that besides _Katy_ and _Mr Zip_, the songs written by the best and most expert of our composers, Berlin and Cohan, were both meant to be sung and were sung--and this took place in the midst of the change to the unsingable type.) At the opposite extreme is the art song--usually the setting and degradation of a poem written for its own sake and usually--let us say dull. The composers of art songs are about fifty paces behind the symphonists and the symphonists are nearly nowhere. The result is that we aren’t in any sense _nourished_ by the writers of art songs and, since we are a musical people, for better or for worse we fall back on the popular song. It is to me a question whether we would be better citizens and more noble in the sight of God if we sang _Narcissus_ instead of _The Girl on the Magazine Cover_.

Once in a while something between the art and the popular song appears, and it is called _My Rosary_ or _The End of a Perfect Day_, and it is unbearable. Because here you have a pretentiousness, a base desire to be above the crowd and yet to please (it is called “uplift,” but it does not mean exalt) the crowd; here is the touch of “art” which makes all things false and vulgar. To be sure, these songs, too, are popular; the desire for culture is as universal as it is depressing. And these are the only popular songs which are really vulgar. I will ask no one to compare them with the real thing. Compare them with false, trivial, ridiculous imitations of the real thing--it exists in some of the occasional songs which composers are always trying and which hardly ever come off. I recall a song written about the Iroquois fire; another about Harry K. Thaw (“Just because he’s a millionaire, Everybody’s willing to treat him unfair”). Only the two songs about Caruso succeeded, and there never was a good one about Roosevelt. Here is one written for Jackie Coogan in _Oliver Twist_:

When the troubles came so fast you kept on smiling, Like a sunbeam ’mid the clouds up in the sky; Though the rest were deep in crime You stayed spotless all the time Though they flayed you Till they made you Weep and cry.

When your little heart was aching for a mother’s tender love, Then the Lord looked down and heard you and blessed you from above. Though they tried to make you bad You stayed good, dear little lad. Would God I could Be half as good As you _Oliver Twist_.

The music is just like that, too. Lower than this--much lower, at least--the popular song never dropped. These songs _never_ become actually, universally popular because the general taste is too high. And I cheerfully set the lowest example beside _A Perfect Day_ for comparison. One type is not obnoxious and the other is; one is common, the other vulgar; one is strong and foolish, the other silly and weak. The case for the popular song may as well rest in the solution of this dilemma as anywhere.

_Toujours Jazz_

TOUJOURS JAZZ

The word jazz is already so complicated that it ought not to be subjected to any new definitions, and the thing itself so familiar that it is useless to read new meanings into it. Jazz is a type of music grown out of ragtime and still ragtime in essence; it is also a method of production and as such an orchestral development; and finally it is the symbol, or the byword, for a great many elements in the spirit of the time--as far as America is concerned it is actually our characteristic expression. This is recognized by Europeans; with a shudder by the English and with real joy by the French, who cannot, however, play it.

The fact that jazz is our current mode of expression, has reference to our time and the way we think and talk, is interesting; but if jazz music weren’t itself good the subject would be more suitable for a sociologist than for an admirer of the gay arts. Fortunately, the music and the way it is played are both of great interest, both have qualities which cannot be despised; and the cry that jazz is the enthusiastic disorganization of music is as extravagant as the prophecy that if we do not stop “jazzing” we will go down, as a nation, into ruin. I am quite ready to uphold the contrary. If--before we have produced something better--we give up jazz we shall be sacrificing nearly all there is of gaiety and liveliness and rhythmic power in our lives. Jazz, for us, isn’t a last feverish excitement, a spasm of energy before death. It is the normal development of our resources, the expected, and wonderful, arrival of America at a point of creative intensity.

Jazz is good--at least good jazz is good--and I propose to summarize some of the known reasons for holding it so. The summary will take me far from the thing one hears and dances to, from the thing itself. The analysis of jazz, musically or emotionally, is not likely to be done in the spirit of jazz itself. There isn’t room on the printed page for a glissando on the trombone, for the sweet sentimental wail of the saxophone, or the sudden irruptions of the battery. Nor is there need for these--intellectually below the belt--attacks. The reason jazz is worth writing about is that it is worth listening to. I have heard it said by those who have suffered much that it is about the only native music worth listening to in America.

Strictly speaking, jazz music is a new development--something of the last two years, arriving long after jazz had begun to be played. I mean that ragtime is now so specifically written for the jazz band that it is acquiring new characteristics. Zez Confrey, Irving Berlin, Fred Fisher, and Walter Donaldson, among others, are creating their work as jazz; the accent in each bar, for example, is marked in the text--the classic idea of the slight accent on the first note of each bar went out when ragtime came in; then ragtime created its own classic notion,--the propulsion of the accent from the first (strong) note to the second (weak). In jazz ragtime the accent can occur anywhere in the bar and is attractively unpredictable. Rhythmically--essentially--jazz is ragtime, since it is based on syncopation, and even without jazz orchestration we should have had the full employment of precise and continuous syncopation which we find in jazz now, in _Pack Up Your Sins_, for example. It is syncopation, too, which has so liberated jazz from normal polyphony, from perfect chords, that M Darius Milhaud is led to expect from jazz a full use of polytonic and atonic harmonies; he notes that in _Kitten on the Keys_ there exists already a chord of the perfect major and the perfect minor. The reason why syncopation lies behind all this is that it is fundamentally an anticipation or a suspension in one instrument (or in the bass) of what is going to happen in another (the treble); and the moment in which a note occurs prematurely or in retard is, frequently, a moment of discord on the strong beat. A dissonance sets in which may or may not be resolved later. The regular use of syncopation, therefore, destroyed the fallacy (as I hold it) of the perfect ear; and this is one reason why Americans are often readier to listen to modern music than peoples who haven’t got used to dissonance in their folk and popular music.

It is not only syncopation that makes us indebted to negro music. Another element is the typical chord structure found there, the characteristic variations from the accustomed. Technically described, one of the most familiar is the subdominant seventh chord with the interval of a minor instead of a major seventh--a method of lowering the leading tone which affects so distant a piece as _A Stairway to Paradise_, where the accented syllable of Par´-adise is skilfully lowered. (By extension ragtime also uses the “diminished third.”) The succession of dominant sevenths and of ninths is another characteristic, and the intrusion of tones which lie outside of our normal piano scale is common.[8] Still another attack on the perfect chord comes from the use of the instruments of the jazz band, one for which ragtime had well prepared us. The notorious slide of the trombone, now repeated in the slide of the voice, means inevitably that in its progress to the note which will make an harmonious chord, the instrument passes through discords. “Smears,” as they are refreshingly called, are the deadliest enemy of the classic tradition, for the ear becomes so accustomed to discords in transition that it ceases to mind them. (We hear them, of course; the pedants are wrong to say that we will cease to appreciate the “real value” of a discord if we aren’t pained by it and don’t leave the hall when one is played without resolution.) In contemporary ragtime, it should be noted, the syncopation of the tonality--playing your b-flat in the bass just before it occurs in the voice, let us say--is often purely a method of warning, an indication of the direction the melody is to take.

I put the strange harmonies of jazz first, not because they are its chief characteristic, but because of the prejudice against them. The suggestion is current that they are sounds which ought never to be uttered; and with this goes an attack on the trick instruments, the motor-horns, of the battery-man. The two things have nothing in common. The instruments of the jazz band are wholly legitimate and its characteristic instrument was invented by a German, after whom it is named, in the middle of the last century, and has been used in serious music by (and since) Meyerbeer--I refer to the saxophone. There is no more legal objection to the muted trombone than to the violin _con sordino_. And the opponents of jazz bands will do well to remember that the pure and lovely D-minor symphony of César Franck was thrown out as a symphony because it used the English horn. The actual sounds produced by the jazz band are entirely legitimate. We have yet to see what use they make of them.

* * * * *

In Krehbiel’s book the whole question of rhythm is comparatively taken for granted, as it should be. Syncopation discovered in classic music, in the Scot’s snap of the Strathspey reel, in Hungarian folk music, is characteristic of three-fifths of the negro songs which Krehbiel analyzed (exactly the same proportion, by the way, as are in the interval of the ordinary _major_). But it is such a normal phenomenon that I have never found a composer to be interested in it. Krehbiel, to be sure, does refer to the “degenerate form” of syncopation which is the basis of our ragtime, and that is hopeful because it indicates that ragtime is a development--intensification, sophistication--of something normal in musical expression. The free use of syncopation has led our good composers of ragtime and jazz to discoveries in rhythm and to a mastery of complications which one finds elsewhere only in the great composers of serious music. In describing the Dahoman war dances at the Chicago World’s Fair, Krehbiel says:

“Berlioz in his supremest effort with his army of drummers produced nothing to compare _in artistic interest_ with the harmonious drumming of these savages. The fundamental effect was a combination of double and triple time, the former kept by the singers, the latter by the drummers, but it is impossible to convey the idea of the wealth of detail achieved by the drummers by means of exchange of the rhythms, syncopation of both simultaneously, and dynamic devices.”

The italics are mine. I am fully aware of the difference between savage and sophisticated, between folk music and popular music; yet I cannot help believing that this entire statement, including the Berlioz whom I greatly admire, could be applied to Paul Whiteman playing _Pack Up Your Sins_ or his incredible mingling of _A Stairway to Paradise_ with a sort of _Beale Street Blues_.

Freedom with rhythm is audible--should I say palpable?--everywhere. _Stumbling_ (Zez Confrey) is in effect a waltz played against a more rapid counter-rhythm, and is interesting also for its fixed groups of uneven notes--triplets with the first note held or omitted for a time, and then with the third note omitted. A similar effect with other means occurs in the treatment of three notes in _Innocent Ingénue Baby_, by George Gershwin, where the same note falls under a different beat with a delightful sense of surprise and uncertainty. Mr Hooker’s words are equally tricky, for it isn’t “Innocent-Ingénue-Baby” at all; it is Innocent Ingénue (_baby_). In _By and By_ Gershwin has shifted an accent from the first to the second simply by giving the second the time-value usually given to the first, a fresh, delightful treatment of a sentimental expression. The variety of method is vastly interesting. Louis Hirsch, whom I rank fairly low as a composer for jazz, has done perfectly one obvious, necessary thing: stopped syncopating in the middle of a piece of ragtime. In the phrase “shake and shimmy everywhere” in _It’s Getting Very Dark on Old Broadway_, he presents the whole-tone scale descending in two bars of full unsyncopated quarter-notes. In the works of Zez Confrey (they are issued with a snobbish tasty cover, rather like the works of Claude Debussy) the syncopation and the exploitation of concurrent, apparently irreconcilable rhythms is first exasperating and eventually exciting. They are specifically piano pieces and require a brilliant proficiency to render them.

It is a little difficult, unless one has the piano score, to determine what part is the work of the composer, what of the jazz orchestra. You can only be fairly certain that whatever melody occurs is the composer’s, and that rhythmically he is followed with some fidelity. All you need to do is to listen to the violin, piano, or whatever instrument it is which holds the beat, to realize what the composer has given. Harmonization is often, and orchestration nearly always, left to other hands. Mr Berlin makes a habit now of giving credit to his chief collaborator, and he deserves it.[9]

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Mr Berlin’s masterpieces (June, 1923, but who shall say?) in jazz are _Everybody Step_ and _Pack Up Your Sins_. I have written so much about him in connexion with song and shows that I can say little more. I see no letting down of his energy, none in his inventiveness. He is, oddly, one of the simplest of our composers. A good way to estimate his capacity is to play the more sentimental songs (_I’m Gonna Pin My Medal on the Girl I Left Behind_, _Someone Else May Be There While I’m Gone_, _All by Myself_) in slow time and then in fast. The amazing way they hold together in each tempo, the way in which the sentiment, the flow of the melody, disengages itself in the slow, and then the rhythm, the beat takes first place in the fast time, is exceptional. You cannot do the same with his own _Some Sunny Day_, nor with _Chicago_ or _Carolina in the Morning_. Berlin’s work is musically interesting, and that means it has a chance to survive. I have no such confidence in _Dardanella_ or _Chicago_. The famous unmelodic four notes occur in the latter as in _Pack Up Your Sins_ (the source is the same, but we need not go into that); the working out is vastly inferior. Fred Fisher’s work is sledge hammer in comparison with Berlin’s, and lacks Berlin’s humour. Of that quality Walter Donaldson has some, and Gershwin much. Donaldson wrote Al Jolson’s _Mammy_ (I can’t remember which, but I’m afraid I didn’t like it), and a song I count heavily on: _Carolina in the Morning_. This song is, incidentally, a startling example of how jazz is improving the lyrics, for the majority of jazz songs are not meant primarily for singing, so the balladists take liberties, and not being held to a definite end-rhyme give us “strolling with your girlie when the dew is pearly early in the morning.”[10] The music is clean, rapid, and audacious. It carries the introduction (of the chorus) almost to the point of exhaustion, suspending the resolution of its phrases until the last possible moment, and then lets go, with a vast relief on the long, somewhat yodelly note. Confrey has done the same thing in _Kitten on the Keys_ where one bar is repeated five times with successive tightening of interest.