Jazz music

“ Like a man,
With his jazz dancing wonder,
With his pansy blossom wonder,
With his apple blossom wonder,
With his rag time lady,
Grand finale of jazz music, like the fall of a pile of dishes in the kitchen. [Pg 91]
The
Rag
Time
Man.
THE DANIEL JAZZ
Let the leader train the audience to roar like lions, and to join in the refrain “Go chain the lions down,” before he begins to lead them in this jazz. ”

“ Certain composers had hoped to find in jazz the basis for an “American” style and their efforts may be considered the most serious of all ever made to create an American music with “popular style” as its foundation (even though jazz can really not be called folk music in the accepted sense of the word) . These composers in jazz saw characteristic elements which they believed rich enough to allow development into a musical vocabulary, one of definite character, though limited to certain emotive characteristics in turn believed to be typically American. ”

“ Gillespie, through his legendary trumpet sound and Fitzgerald, through her pure, energetic voice, treated people around the world to spirited and soulful jazz music. Their work has influenced countless musicians, and continues to inspire listeners young and old. ”

“ It is not necessary that he be able to play all the types of modern jazz, but he should be familiar with the common jargon of jazz and should learn the distinctions which exist between these so-called musical forms. ”

“ Hereafter when we speak of rhythm it will mean movement either in tones or in gestures. Rhythm expressed in tones makes music; rhythm expressed in gestures makes the dance. The reason we like dance music and marches is that we feel the rhythm, the thing that makes us want to mark the beat of the music with our feet, or hands, or with head bobbings. This love of the beat is strong in the savage, and upon this he builds his music.
Our American Jazz is the result of our desire for strong rhythms and shows that we, for all our culture, have something in us of the savage’s feeling for movement. ”

“ The music produced, however, bore no longer a specific relationship to jazz, which latter continued to develop along the lines normal to any product that has become an article of mass consumption, a variable product excluding neither imagination nor musical talent, but always remaining a genre and, by reason of its inherent restriction, never becoming a style. The features which once attracted attention by now had been absorbed into the contemporary musical vocabulary to which jazz could make no further contributions. ”

“ Skilfully utilizing the fullest resources of jazz techniques, styles, and idioms, Ellington has created in these larger works an authentically American music. He himself prefers to consider many of these works as “Negro music” rather than jazz; nevertheless, in their blues harmonies, jazz colorations, 87 and melodic and rhythmic techniques these works represented jazz music at its very best. ”

“ Songs first played in clubs in New Orleans, Memphis, and Chicago are now recognized and loved around the world. As jazz has expanded beyond its acoustic roots, African-American dreams, hopes, and joys have remained at the music's core. ”

“ From offstage is heard the rippling of some chords on the piano. Then Jack’s voice breaks out in the words of “Red Hot Mama.” He sings it with that rich plaintiveness which, combined with syncopation, has become the convention for the rendition of jazz. Half-way through the chorus the center door opens and the Cantor enters. He stands rooted to the floor, outraged at the sounds he hears. He looks toward the door of the music room, then, as if afraid of what he might see there, moves back automatically, taking his hat off, leaving the skull-cap on his head. ”

“ Jazz, often called America's classical music, so influenced our culture that Americans named a decade after it. Like the country of its birth, jazz blends many traditions, such as African-American folk, rhythm and blues, French Creole classical form, and gospel. Through the creation and performance of music like jazz, black Americans were better able to exchange ideas freely across racial and cultural barriers. ”

“ The main reason is educational. It's good for the young people to discover all of a sudden that music isn't just a guitar and a drum and a bad out-of-tune singer. ... I think as young people become more sophisticated in their tastes, they begin to realize that jazz is just as high an art form as classical music."
One of his chief gripes about jazz in America, he explains in a voice as rough as sandpaper, is that "during the season you might see 15 or 20 award shows on television dedicated to country and western slop, but you'll never see a jazz presentation in its true form. ”

“ The music of the modern ballroom is almost entirely supplied by the United States. The music used in the American dances is no longer a string band and piano, but consists of various combinations, the most common of which perhaps is: piano, violin, alto or tenor saxophone, banjo and jazz-drum. This last-named needs some explanation. The word "jazz" signifies noise in America and is in no way a dance. ”

“ Any work of Art should leave us with this conviction, that nothing could be added or left out without marring the perfect proportion of the whole. "Jazz," whether in Music or in any other direction, gives just the very opposite effect, marring the sense of proportion and distorting the feeling of satisfaction. It exists as a testimony to a morbid dissatisfaction with life, it gives emphasis to the unbalanced and neurotic. ”

“ They see that it encourages thousands of the stupid and vulgar to fancy that they can understand art, and hundreds of the conceited to imagine that they can create it....
It is understood that Mr Bell is discussing the whole of the jazz movement, not ragtime music alone. I do not wish to go into the other arts, except to say that if he is jazz, then Mr Joyce’s sense of form, his tremendous intellectual grasp of his æsthetic problem, and his solution of that problem, are far more proof than is required of the case for jazz. ”

“ One might possibly add one more brand of nationalism to the folklorist, evocative, and primitivist—the attempt to base a national style on jazz. Such classification is of course artificial and of purely practical value. While folklorism, the evocation of American images, and the type of primitivism we have been discussing, are related exclusively to American backgrounds, jazz, on the other hand, though it originated in this country and is considered a product of our culture, has had an influence on music outside the United States. ”

“ Among Christian workers and other intellectual cripples the delusion seems to persist that jazz is highly aphrodisiacal. I never encounter a sermon on the subject without finding it full of dark warnings to parents, urging them to keep their nubile daughters out of the jazz palaces on the ground that the voluptuous music will inflame their passions and so make them easy prey to bond salesmen, musicians and other such carnal fellows. All this seems to me to be nonsense. Jazz, in point of fact, is not voluptuous at all. ”

“ Whether the inventors of Jazz thought that, in their pursuit of beauty and intensity, the artists of the nineteenth century had strayed too far from the tastes and interests of common but well-to-do humanity I know not, but certain it is that, like Racine and Molière, and unlike Beaudelaire and Mallarmé and César Franck, they went to la bonne compagnie for inspiration and support. La bonne compagnie they found in the lounges of great hotels, on transatlantic liners, in wagons-lits, in music-halls, and in expensive motor-cars and restaurants. ”

“ Royalties from the sale of sheet music and records brought in a fortune. Through the years it has never lost its popularity; it is still one of the most frequently performed American symphonic works.
Its prime significance rests in the fact that it decisively proved that it was possible to produce good music within ambitious structures utilizing idioms and techniques of American jazz. The Rhapsody in Blue was by no means the first composition to do so ”

“ The Negro has cultivated, like all races, songs and dances. As we said of the Russian, his song is sad and full of tragedy, but the dance is gay, wild and primitive. From the dance of the Negro we borrowed the rhythm formerly called ragtime, which is now jazz. The principle of the Negro rhythm 144is syncopation, that is, the accent is shifted to the unaccented part of a measure or of a beat, like this,—, , . All sorts of combinations are possible in this rhythm, and it is this variety that is fascinating in a good jazz tune. ”

“ The African-American music tradition also reflects creativity and individualism. Blues, jazz, soul, and rock and roll synthesize various musical traditions to create altogether new sounds. Their novel chord progressions, improvisation, and mood showcase individual musicians while also creating a cohesive musical unit. ”

“ He has written other sonatas for piano and for violin, songs, chamber music and orchestral works.
Negro Spirituals versus Jazz This brings us face to face with one of the most discussed questions of the day: the influence of Negro music and jazz on serious composition. The pure Negro music is the Spiritual and not jazz, which may be the typically American idiom we have been waiting for.
It is not Negro but is developed from the Negro dance rhythm, from a real folk music; it is the result of Negro music played upon by American life and influences ”

“ Full in the light of the stars, an exquisite château rose from the borders of the lake, climbed in marble radiance half the height of an adjoining mountain, then melted in grace, in perfect symmetry, in translucent feminine languor, into the massed darkness of a forest of pine. The many towers, the slender tracery of the sloping parapets, the chiselled wonder of a thousand yellow windows with their oblongs and hectagons and triangles of golden light, the shattered softness of the intersecting planes of star-shine and blue shade, all trembled on John's spirit like a chord of music. ”

“ “There are quiet places also in the mind,” he said meditatively. “But we build bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately—to put a stop to the quietness. We don’t like the quietness. All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head—round and round, continually.” He made a circular motion with his hand. “And the jazz bands, the music-hall songs, the boys shouting the news. What’s it for? what’s it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost it isn’t there. Ah, but it is; it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. ”

“ These young musicians are wholly able to enjoy jazz and even to become adepts, without pretensions and illusions. They are conscious, however, of the manner in which certain composers, who within their memories were once considered “esoteric,” have achieved almost classic status, are regularly if not frequently performed, and often harvest great success. Bártòk, and to some extent Alban Berg, come to their minds, and they have noticed the manner in which these composers have achieved what practically no one expected. ”

“ The shakes, thrills, vibratos, smears, and slides are natural to him, although they produce tones outside the scale, because he has never been tutored into a feeling for perfect tones, as white men have; and he uses these with a great joy in the surprise they give, in the way they adorn or destroy a melody; he is given also to letting instruments follow their own bent, because he has a faultless sense of rhythm and he always comes out right in the end. But this is only100 the beginning of the jazz band—for its perfection we go afield. ”

“ But one falls back on Pack Up Your Sins and Soon as more interesting pieces of music even if one can whistle only the first two bars. (I pass the question of falling farther back, to the music of99 high seriousness, which is another matter; it is quite possible, however, that the Sacre du Printemps of Strawinsky, to choose an example not unaffected by the jazz age, will outlive the marble monument of the Music Box.) ”

“ You must leave the theater unless you desire the thankless experience of vomiting.
The commercial cacophony of American lusts and greeds has borrowed a clarinet, a flute, and a saxophone from the admiration of American poets and is one-stepping with thousands of words, after the office and factory have closed for the day, “Swee-et Mama, well your papa’s done gone mad!”—the jerky, leering pandemonium of actual jazz on a polished floor interests me far more than its more proper and adulterated echoes—the glorious American poets of our time. ”

“ Besides, to bring intellect into art is to invite home a guest who is apt to be inquisitive and even impartial. Intellect in Jazz circles is treated rather as money was once in polite society—it is taken for granted. Nobility, beauty, and intellectual subtlety are alike ruled out: the first two are held up to ridicule, the last is simply abused. What Jazz wants are romps and fun, and to make fun; that is why, as I have said, its original name Ragtime was the better. At its best Jazz rags every thing.
The inspiration of Jazz is the same as that of the art of the grand siècle. ”

“ 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 before84 death. ”