SLSL context: "jazz as a branch of artistic modernism"

[pynchonoid]

<http://www.commentarymagazine.com/teachout.htm>

Jazz as Modern Art 
by Terry Teachout 

January 2003 

[...] As early as 1921, the influential critic Clive
Bell was referring to such major modernists as Picasso
in painting, Stravinsky in music, and T.S. Eliot in
poetry as members of the “jazz movement.” 

Interestingly enough, however, there has been no
systematic discussion of jazz as a branch of artistic
modernism, and jazz’s own “modernity” has for all
intents and purposes been taken for granted. Hence the
significance of Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and
Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce, in which Alfred Appel,
Jr., a professor emeritus of English at Northwestern
University, argues that “classic jazz
(1920-50)—especially [as represented by] Louis
Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Billie
Holiday, Jack Teagarden, and Charlie Parker”—is indeed
part of “the great modernist tradition in the arts.” 

[...] BUT FOR all the panache with which Appel equates
Louis Armstrong and Henri Matisse, readers of Jazz
Modernism who are conversant with the history of jazz
as well as with the School of Paris are likely to feel
certain nagging doubts about his blanket use of the
term “modern,” however qualified, to describe pre-1950
jazz itself. 

For one thing, Armstrong and his contemporaries,
however “modern” their music may have sounded at the
time, had none of the habits of mind normally
attributed to modernist artists. Not only were they
sketchily educated men who were in no way
introspective about their art, but few of them would
even have gone so far as to call themselves artists
(Armstrong preferred the word “entertainer”). For
them, jazz was not a critique of existing musical
styles but a utilitarian accompaniment to social
dancing, which they played to the best of their
ability. And while some jazz musicians of the 20’s and
30’s, most notably the white instrumentalists
associated with the cornetist Bix Beiderbecke,
listened to and were influenced by the music of modern
composers like Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky, most of
them knew little else—if even that much—about the
modern movement in art. 2 

Jazz musicians themselves never use the term “modern”
when speaking of Armstrong-era jazz. Instead, they
reserve that term for bebop, the harmonically and
rhythmically complex style of jazz associated with the
alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and the trumpet player
Dizzy Gillespie, as well as for later styles
descending from or otherwise related to the
Parker-Gillespie idiom. These include the “cool jazz”
played in the 50’s by groups like the Modern Jazz
Quartet and the Dave Brubeck Quartet (whose
pianist-leader studied with Milhaud). 

Significantly, Armstrong himself used the word
“modern” to describe bebop in a pejorative sense: 

"So you get all them weird chords which don’t mean
nothing, and first people get curious about it just
because it’s new, but soon they get tired of it
because it’s really no good and you got no melody to
remember and no beat to dance to. So they’re all poor
again and nobody is working, and that’s what that
modern malice done for you."

To this, Dizzy Gillespie replied in turn: 

"Nowadays, we try to work out different rhythms and
things that they didn’t think about when Louis
Armstrong blew. In his day all he did was play
strictly from the soul—just strictly from his heart.
You got to go forward and progress. We study."

A REVEALING echo of this exchange—and of the
contradictory attitudes it reveals toward the very
idea of the “modern”—can be heard in a 1968 essay
about jazz by the great English poet Philip Larkin.
Larkin loved Armstrong-era jazz, and would later
describe Armstrong himself as “an enormously important
cultural figure in our century.” But once he began
listening to and reading about bebop, Larkin soon
detected that belief in “progress” and necessity for
“study” of which Gillespie spoke. In contrast to
Gillespie, however, he took these to be signs not of
progress but of decadence: 

"This was the language of criticism of modern
painting, modern poetry, modern music. Of course! How
glibly I had talked of modern jazz, without realizing
the force of the adjective: this was modern jazz, and
Parker was a modern jazz player just as Picasso was a
modern painter and [Ezra] Pound a modern poet. . . . I
went back to my books: “After Parker, you had to be
something of a musician to follow the best jazz of the
day.” Of course! After Picasso! After Pound! There
could hardly have been a conciser summary of what I
don’t believe about art."  

What was Larkin getting at here? As a poet, he himself
was the very model of what Appel calls a jazz
modernist—that is, an “alchemist of the vernacular”
who wrote about the problems and preoccupations of
modern life both in an unmistakably “modern” way and
in a way that was at the same time perfectly
accessible. As such, however, he would have repudiated
Appel’s claim that the music of Parker and Gillespie
is cut from the same cloth as that of Armstrong and
Ellington; the latter, for Larkin, were “modern” in a
good sense, the former in a bad sense. Still, he would
no doubt have been interested to learn that Appel,
too, draws a line beyond which jazz modernism devolves
into something hermetic and inaccessible. The
difference is that Appel draws it a decade later than
Larkin—in 1950, not 1940. 

According to Appel, Parker, Gillespie, and the other
beboppers were true jazz modernists, whose music was
at least potentially intelligible to a popular
audience. Not so the more difficult bop-era pianist
Thelonious Monk (who was “unconcerned about
accessibility”) or any of the post-bop avant-gardists
like the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane who began to
dominate modern jazz in the late 50’s: 

"This jazz new wave eschewed the salient
characteristics of 1920-1950 classic jazz:
accessibility; humor; a capacity for joy; the Great
(white) American Songbook, the backbone of jazz
multiculturalism (music by Gershwin, Berlin, Rodgers,
Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Vincent
Youmans, Hoagy Carmichael, Arthur Schwartz, Vernon
Duke, Harry Warren); and the goals and ideals of
racial integration."

[...] Interestingly, some of Davis’s innovations were
analogous to those of the modernist painters who were
his contemporaries. Lacking the extreme technical
development of Charlie Parker, with whose quintet he
played in the late 40’s, Davis instead systematically
pared down the “maximalist” language of bebop to
create a new style full of wide-open harmonic spaces
that allowed players to improvise more freely and
flexibly—an approach reminiscent of the way in which
such color-oriented abstract expressionists of the
50’s as Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler sought to
develop a less spatially congested alternative to the
canvas-crowding “all-over” abstraction of Jackson
Pollock. 

At the same time, Davis’s repertoire, both on record
and in live performance, included such familiar
standards as Richard Rodgers’ “My Funny Valentine” and
George Gershwin’s “Summertime,” which he played in the
same spare, uncluttered manner as his versions of jazz
originals like Thelonious Monk’s “’Round Midnight” and
his own “So What.” This made it possible for Davis to
stay in the vanguard of stylistic innovation while
simultaneously remaining intelligible to a popular
audience. [...] 


-Doug






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