Jazz

“ I'd rather listen to a good jazz band any time than to some piece by Beethoven that hasn't any more tune to it than a bunch of fighting cats, and you couldn't whistle it to save your life! But that isn't the point. ”

“ Beauty had become too tame. The swing, the jazz, of an earlier age had evolved into a nerve-racking bedlam of discordant sounds not even needing a composer—mechanically timed, mechanically produced, mechanically precise. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Jazz rhythm is contrapuntal rhythm. Europe says that it is our one original and important contribution to music! This is a strong statement, but as “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” their serious 20th century composers have flattered us by writing jazz, and we have Piano Rag by Stravinsky, a Syncopated Sonata by Jean Wiener, jazz by Darius Milhaud, Casella, Honegger, and even Debussy was tempted into writing Golliwogg’s Cake Walk. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The bare-back rider balances agilely on the applause which is the tail of her song. Orchestral instruments warm up for jazz. The flute is a cat that ripples its fur against the deep-purring saxophone. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They were headed by a famous flute-player, distinguished throughout New York for his feat of standing on his head and shimmying with his shoulders while he played the latest jazz on his flute. During his performance the lights were extinguished except for the spotlight on the flute-player and another roving beam that threw flickering shadows and changing kaleidoscopic colors over the massed dancers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In jazz, for example, one demonstrates one's rootedness in the tradition by quoting a standard, but also one's virtuosity in being able to trim it into a particular eight-bar solo, beginning and ending on the right note for the current moment in the chord progression. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He, at any rate, who comes to bury Jazz should realize what the movement has to its credit, viz., one great musician, one considerable poet, ten or a dozen charming or interesting little masters and mistresses, and a swarm of utterly fatuous creatures who in all good faith believe themselves Artists. ”

“ The fantastic jazz in art circles known as L'Art Nouveau some years ago, temporarily upset the balance of the younger generation of designers, spent its force in unchecked licence, and ended so ignominiously that it is now entirely forgotten, nor has it left any permanent impression upon succeeding schools. ”

“ 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. ”

“ JAZZONIA
Oh, silver tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!
In a Harlem cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
A dancing girl whose eyes are bold
Lifts high a dress of silken gold.
Oh, singing tree! ”

“ 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. ”

“ The best Jazz artists are never long-winded. In their admirable and urbane brevity they remind one rather of the French eighteenth century. But surprise is an essential ingredient. An accomplished Jazz artist, whether in notes or words, will contrive, as a rule, to stop just where you expected him to begin. Themes and ideas are not to be developed ”

“ 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. ”

“ I'd have liked to hear more—it was Dixieland times two—what the Psis call Psixieland. That's jazz played by a gang of telepaths. Each one knows what the others are about to play. The result is extemporaneous counterpoint, but without the clinkers we associate with jazz. ”

“ A Christian mother recently found no little difficulty in leading her ’teen-age girls to overcome the habit of singing jazz. It is what they heard over the neighbor’s radio, in school, on the street, everywhere. ”

“ Only amongst the whipper-snappers of painting will you discover a will to affront tradition, or attract attention by deliberate eccentricity. Only, I think, the Italian Futurists, their transalpine apes, a few revolutionaries on principle, but especially the Futurists with their electric-lit presentation of the more obvious peculiarities of contemporary life and their taste for popular actualities can be said definitely to have attempted a pictorial expression of Jazz. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This somewhat unpleasant tale, published as a novelette in the "Smart Set" in July, 1920, relates a series of events which took place in the spring of the previous year. Each of the three events made a great impression upon me. In life they were unrelated, except by the general hysteria of that spring which inaugurated the Age of Jazz, but in my story I have tried, unsuccessfully I fear, to weave them into a pattern—a pattern which would give the effect of those months in New York as they appeared to at least one member of what was then the younger generation. ”

“ “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. ”

“ And will I like being called a jazz-baby? ”

“ If your delineation be authentically musical, musical not in word only, but in heart and substance, in all the thoughts and utterances of it, in the whole conception of it, then it will be poetical; if not, not.—Musical: how much lies in that! A musical thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely the melody that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be, here in this world. All inmost things, we may say, are melodious ”