Jazz Music between World Wars Essay

The jazz craze in music during the 1920s reflected a general spirit of the times for many commentators like Seldes that this decade became known as the Jazz Age. Following World War I, jazz music certainly captured the popular imagination. The rapid popularity of jazz music led to its equally rapid spread among musicians. No other style up to this time in American popular music so quickly came to dominate popular performance. The American vernacular, which had already made significant inroads into the commercial popular music market, had captured popular tastes at an unprecedented level, seemingly sweeping aside the old â€Å"standards. † And just as ragtime and syncopated dance music became part of earlier commercial popular music, the dominance of jazz in the 1920s also represented a major triumph of the black vernacular in American popular music. The jazz craze began through the influence of non-professional musicians. While still marginal to most legitimate venues, non-professional musicians performing the jazz vernacular were attracting audiences to clubs, theaters, restaurants, and were popular in the speakeasies of the 1920s. They also had opportunities for their music to reach a broader audience in a booming record market following World War I. Professional musicians, however, quickly adopted jazz music in their orchestras and smaller bands. They co-opted the jazz fever while simultaneously distancing themselves from non-professionals. (Charters, 39-43) By occupying the most lucrative jobs in theaters, dance halls, hotels, and other venues, professional musicians positioned themselves as the premier interpreters of this new vernacular idiom in commercial popular music. The common defense of jazz as good music during the Jazz Age embraced the professional musicians and professional composers who performed and created jazz music, not the non-professional musicians who first introduced it. In adopting jazz idioms, professional musicians were simply continuing the process of cultivating the American vernacular. Black professional musicians were already adopting black vernacular idioms in their music making in earlier syncopated society orchestras and simply adopted jazz idioms as well as the name in their â€Å"jazz† orchestras. (Bushell, 72-75) White professional musicians had performed rags as part of their repertoire in the past, but with the jazz craze, many were quick to adopt syncopated dance and jazz practices in some form as the defining style of their profession. White professional musicians also quickly followed black professional musicians in transforming their bands into jazz orchestras, and just as quickly claimed to be the modern proponents of this new American popular music. Black and white professional jazz orchestras in the 1920s established the basic instrumentation, arrangement, and techniques of the big band dance orchestras that dominated American popular music until the 1950s. In the 1920s, an emerging new ideal of good music involved a balancing of the previous cultivated practices and cultivated music of professional musicians with popular vernacular idioms. The proper balance, however, was hotly debated. Professional musicians would constantly distance themselves from the pure vernacular of non-professional musicians. In defending their balance of the cultivated and the vernacular in popular performance, popular tastes, however, were demanding jazz music and a professional musician would be remiss to ignore his patrons in the popular music market as much as stodgy critics and some professional musicians would rail against the pernicious influence of jazz. Professional musicians in mediating the popular music market had to continue to navigate the moral, aesthetic, class, and racial construction of good music in America. While popular tastes in musical entertainment promoted the black vernacular in commercial popular music, the plight of the African American community in the United States continued to be dire. Some leaders in the black community had hoped that African Americans’ participation during World War I in both the military and in industry, and the Great Migration out of the Jim Crow South, would change their fortunes as segregated and oppressed second class citizens. The post-war years, however, dashed most hopes of any immediate positive change. (DeVeaux, 6-29) Race relations went in the opposite direction. Race riots sprung up across the nation while lynching continued to be a regular occurrence. Efforts continued to secure the legal segregation of black communities, and the labor movement continued to exclude blacks. The Ku Klux Klan reached its peak membership and popularity during the 1920s. The segregation and denigration of the black community was also reflected in the social organization of American music. (Hansen, 493-97) Besides the segregation of audiences and most venues, black professional musicians also remained outside the artistic community of white professional musicians in terms of unions, band organizations, and this community’s vision of a professional class of artist in America. The balance of the cultivated and the vernacular among professional musicians also continued to run against elitist conceptions of popular music and popular musicians as less legitimate than the music, musicians, and composers of the European cultivated tradition of classical and opera music. Black professional musicians also continued to strive to break through the barriers erected against them in the world of European cultivated music. This continuing tension in the implied lower status of professional musicians who performed American popular music erupted during the Jazz Age into an open rebellion against the European cultivated tradition. Professional musicians in jazz orchestras attempted to counter the singular role claimed by the European cultivated tradition. These musicians asserted that jazz was a true American or African American school of fine art music in contrast to cultivated European music – a populist appeal for high art legitimacy. This high art turn in American popular music, however, ultimately failed when the depression wreaked havoc on the popular music market. With the introduction of a new popular music market of live performances, records, broadcasts, and films, the quest for legitimacy among professional popular musicians would have to take another route. It was a period where professional popular musicians in adopting the jazz vernacular went against the reigning cultural hierarchy in America. (Peretti, 234-40) The period following World War I was a crucial turning point in American popular music. The American vernacular in general was storming the ramparts of the old edifice of good music as Tin Pan Alley song and dance dominated popular performance. Both professional and nonprofessional musicians also were benefiting from more affluent times and the growing importance of entertainment in the lives of most urban Americans. To the chagrin of elite and moral defenders of nineteenth century cultural idealism, most urban Americans were readily joining a Cultural Revolution in commercial popular entertainment. And at the center of this revolution was the national craze for jazz music and jazz dance. The jazz craze made syncopated rhythms and other black vernacular idioms central elements of American popular music making. While many small jazz bands performed a black vernacular style of music from the Delta Region of New Orleans, jazz music in the 1920s encompassed not only this style but syncopated dance music, blues music, piano rags, and virtually any tune jazzed up by musicians. The jazz craze in essence was the craze for the black vernacular among popular audiences and the performance of this vernacular in some form by popular musicians and popular singers both professional and non-professional. The extent to which musicians and singers actually adopted the black vernacular rather than a superficial imitation – critique later jazz critics would make of certain sweet jazz during the 1920s – is less important than the fact that jazz entered the consciousness of the nation and musicians as the reigning popular music. The word Jazz seems to have found a permanent place in the vocabulary of popular music. It was used originally as an adjective describing a band that in playing for dancing were so infected with their own rhythm that they themselves executed as much, if not more, contortions than the dancers. The popularity of the raggy music has created a demand for music with exaggerated syncopation, an attempt as it were to produce the wonderful broken rhythms of the primitive African jungle orchestra. The jazz craze also coincided with the growth of black entertainment. During the 1920s, black entertainment districts like the South Side in Chicago and Harlem in New York City witnessed a major boom. Besides entertaining the large black populations of The Great Migration, black musicians and singers were entertaining white audiences who went uptown for their entertainment. The boom in the 1920s in black entertainment, as Kenny (1993, 89-92) and Shaw (1987, 122-30) show, was driven by the demand for the black vernacular. In musical theater, musical revues, vaudeville, dance, and speakeasies, the black vernacular and black artists were in demand. This demand was met not only in black entertainment districts, but also outside these districts as black artists performed for white audiences in musical revues, dance halls, and clubs in white entertainment districts. The popularity of the black vernacular also increased when record producers discovered a race market in black music. Most members of the New England School of cultivated music like Mason, and other defenders of the old ideal of good music, were stridently against the influence of jazz in both popular music and classical music. Repeating the moral, aesthetic, class, and racial epithets used to condemn the popularization of vernacular jazz, the guardians of the old ideal ridiculed any idea of jazz meriting the status of high art or even having an influence on serious music composition and performance. As David Stanley Smith, Professor of Music at Yale University, argued in The Musician of August 1926, jazz music’s â€Å"monotonous rhythm, as unvaried as the chug-chug of a steam engine, enslaves its practitioners within a formula, and induces in composer, performer, and listener a stupor of mind and emotion. † On the other hand, many of those individuals who embraced â€Å"modernism† in cultivated music were sympathetic to jazz music. These modernists emphasized jazz as the legitimate expression of the times and a nation. (Stewart, 102-109) The debate within the cultivated tradition between old idealists and modernists on the influence of jazz revolved mainly around the influence of popular jazz on serious music composition and performance. That the question would be posed in such a manner spoke to how, by the 1920s, the European cultivated tradition had organizationally and ideologically broken from the world of commercial popular music. Crossover between popular music and cultivated music occurred during the 1920s, but organizational and ideological barriers left little chance that jazz musicians would transform the cultivated tradition. The very formation of a separate world of cultivated music in the United States was predicated on its distinction from commercial popular music, popular musicians, and popular tastes – a distinction further exacerbated by jazz music being an expression of the black vernacular. The influence of jazz within the cultivated tradition, however, was debated during the 1920s as professional musicians laid claim to a truly American art form and modernists promoted the incorporation of jazz in serious music composition and performance. (Badger, 48-67) Traditionalists, of course, had reason to be optimistic as the economic depression following the 1929 stock market crash wreaked havoc on the commercial market of popular jazz music. Defenders of the European cultivated tradition also had reason to celebrate as the confident proclamations of professional musicians on jazz as America’s first authentic art receded to the background as these musicians adjusted to changed economic circumstances and a new popular music market. Professional musicians’ struggle for legitimacy during the Jazz Age, however, laid the ideological and musical foundation upon which the next generation of professional musicians would construct a modern jazz paradigm. In their quest for legitimacy as professional artists, they were the first popular artists to attempt to transform the moral, aesthetic, class, and racial constructions of the old ideal of good music in America. While their efforts contained their own complicity in manners of distinction, the contradictions of an elite populism embedded in a racist culture, they did struggle to create an alternative understanding of art and society in America. As the self-appointed mediators of the American vernacular, professional musicians and composers ardently worked to construct an alternative form of good music to that of the European cultivated music tradition – a music reflecting in some fashion the world of popular audiences and popular tastes. ( DeVeaux, 525-40) In this process of syncretism, the reinvention and reinterpretation of musical idioms and practices, these artists created the American big band dance orchestra and the Tin Pan Alley song that dominated American popular music until the middle of the twentieth century. While jazz did not become a universally recognized American high art form during the Jazz Age, professional musicians and composers transformed it into legitimate popular art music, although at the expense of those non-professional vernacular musicians who did not assimilate into their profession. The need for professional musicians to legitimate popular dance orchestras disappeared after the 1920s, and the old ideal of good music no longer occupied this professional class of musician. (Gioia, 213-20) The emergence of an alternative ideal of good music among professional musicians signaled a final separation between popular music making and the cultivated tradition in American music. This break was both ideological and practical; a reflection of both a new professional ethos among professional musicians and the culmination of the division in the social organization of American music between the world of popular music and the world of European cultivated music. (Lopes, 25-36) The previous crisscrossing professionally between the cultivated tradition and popular music making was no longer part of this profession. The future big band leaders and musicians of the Swing Era began their professional careers not in symphonies, but in the small jazz ensembles and jazz orchestras of the Jazz Age. The fate of jazz was seemed threatened by the power over popular music of a new mass media industry of broadcasts, recordings, and film. Just when the fortunes of jazz seemed dead and buried, however, the swing craze reignited popular interest in the cultivated jazz vernacular. (Hennessey, 156-60) The promotion of sweet music and the subsequent swing craze, however, set in motion a new distinction within the profession of musician. No longer than singularly obsessed with the world of European cultivated music, professional musicians who assimilated the black jazz vernacular now viewed sweet music as their more direct nemesis. The race and class boundaries articulated in the old ideal of good music were now articulated more directly for professional musicians in the distinction between the popular music cultures of sweet and swing.