V.V.--Inanimate jazz

[Don Corathers]

This from a New York Times piece about hillbilly jazz of the forties and fifties, referring specifically to the practice of substituting electric guitars for horns by players like Spade Cooley and Tex Williams:

"And strange this music is, although differently strange from the things the jazz modernists were turning out. Where the boppers were trying to find new uses for old tools--acoustic instruments--the hillbilly modernists applied new electric tools to old material, fundamentally altering it. A line that would be warm and swinging if played on a trumpet hums and crackles with an alien, barely controlled energy. The songs' melodies and harmonies might be familiar, but their tonalities have become inhuman, metallic."

Don 
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