The Pop of Yestercentury

In music, labels supposedly don’t matter. Yet this ad (shared by a collector via Facebook) might surprise even some of the most liberal non-categorizers:

So would this editorial by George L. Stone in the April 1925 issue of Jacobs’ Band Monthly (from the generous Ralph Wondraschek’s ample library), published in the middle of the “Jazz Age”:

Jazz is not strictly an undesirable type of music. It is a snappy, up-to-date style of music enjoyed by most people, provided it is played right. [Joseph Knecht]’s orchestra (broadcasting from New York) plays music that is enjoyed by thousands. [Don Bestor]’s orchestra of Chicago and Dok Eisenbourg’s “Symphonians” of “Boston” also play likewise.

Most jazz histories do not and probably don’t need to include Knecht, Lombardo, and Eisenbourg. Bestor may get mentioned as the director of the Benson Orchestra of Chicago, which included Frank Trumbauer and other jazz players more likely to appear in those histories. Lewis and Whiteman are more likely to appear in jazz histories because they employed so many important jazz figures.

Yet the general musical output of these bandleaders would no longer be classified as jazz. For some listeners, referring to them as jazz musicians, let alone “masters,” would seem confusing, comical, or even frustrating.

For many, “jazz” is more than a category for sorting music. It refers to an art form synthesizing authentic emotion and technical accomplishment into a historic musical medium. It’s a history of social and cultural achievements and hardships that continues to shape the world. It’s a collection of stories: joyous, hopeful, sad, funny, infuriating, triumphant, and brave.

Using the term “jazz” in a careless way is about more than miscategorizing music (though that’s not inconsequential, either). For some, misapplication reflects racial appropriation, social injustice, and deeper cultural issues beyond the sound of the music. If labels don’t matter, I’d hate to see what does.

Scholars and historians have covered the origins and shifting applications of the word as well as the many misunderstandings of its original meaning. Most recently, Lewis Porter published a detailed and informative (yet clear and succinct) discussion about how a slang term for “lively” developed into such a vital and sometimes controversial signifier.

Yet alongside the socio-political, philosophical, etymological, and artistic debates, there is still the sound of the music played by Lewis, Lombardo, and Whiteman, as well as Nathan Glantz, Sam Lanin, Ben Selvin, and a thousand other examples of “jazz” that’s no longer or supposedly never even was jazz. The varying degrees of jazz influence and presence of bona fide jazz musicians in these bands frequently place them in the vicinity of jazz, proper.

To many jazz purists, actually saying you like the MUSIC (as opposed to just the hot records or the ten seconds of solo improvisation on a single side) is like admitting to a taste for American cheese: something that elitists reject as a supposedly bastardized version of the more authentic item that is purer, created with sincerity, and healthier for you.

Comparing food and music might seem glib, but they’re both important cultural elements that reflect our tastes and even our values. Or they’re both mass-produced products we mindlessly consume as a distraction. Examples of each alignment might seem clear-cut. But I know people with eager tastebuds and discriminating palates who can explain their favorite varieties and culinary uses of American cheese at length. I’ve also met people who don’t know why they only buy imported brie.

Likewise, I’ve had plenty of conversations with audience members at Symphony Hall who have no idea what they’re about to hear or if they liked what they just heard. I’ve also met musicians whose insights into the loudest, grungiest, most impenetrable varieties of metal or the simplest, catchiest pop earworms made me run to the record store.

More often, the history, purpose, design, or simple thought behind popular, mass-produced, commercial works is assumed to be secondary, inferior, or non-existent. A jazz performance is “art,” while whatever the “dance bands” led by Selvin and the others were doing—which jazz players had to suffer through just to earn a living—was mere “entertainment.” Jazz is often framed as a perennially progressive art form that transcends time. Entertainment, popular music, commercial products, etc., are, by definition, of the moment and always on the conveyor belt to historical amnesia. Lawrence Gushee, in his liner notes to the LP Steppin’ on the Gas: Rags to Jazz, 1913–27 (New World Records, 1977) provides an elegant summary:

Ragtime and jazz were both a part of the popular dance and entertainment music of the United States and separate from it. They used many of the same conventions of musical vocabulary and form as popular music and were symbiotic with the vocal and dance styles of an age. But in exploring musical vocabulary and form, and in striving for artistic control and imagination beyond the requirements of a functional music, they transcended the limits we usually set to popular music and have proved durable in a way that most commercial, fashionable music is not.

Maybe Gushee is making a value judgment, suggesting that the “durable” works are inherently better. Or, this might be a historical point: Things that later generations happen to find endurable are often evaluated as “better.”

Some music does focus on musical experimentation. Or, more accurately, some musicians get to or are more interested in various degrees of experimentation. But what about creative variation within a form?

Louis Armstrong’s expressive and virtuosic flights interest me as a self-taught music student and excite me as a human being. But so does something like Mike Markels and his band on “Say, Persianna, Say”:

I’m still grateful to Colin Hancock for introducing me to this side and for his incredible musical and scholarly contributions to this music.

Eddie Davis’s violin on “Say, Persianna, Say” is not a “hot” obbligato, but an interesting second voice that adds both texture and spark to a melody the listener has already heard a few times by that point in the record. Saxophonist Loren McMurray shuffles registers, articulations, and textures for further variety: Compare the rich, coppery, tenor-like middle register variations alongside the high-register violin in the last chorus with his signature percussive slap tongue in the minor-key verse and his silkier upper register in the first chorus. Fred Schilling is a great ensemble trombonist with a broad sound that lets the other parts float through it. Keith Pitman’s bass sax provides such a firm resonant sound, both rhythmically and tonally; I get the impression of tectonic plates letting everything slide effortlessly along on top, until you focus a little and hear the strength under all of it.

These exotica tunes seem like period novelties now, and their broad stereotypes often range from confusing to offensive. But they also offer some interesting musical material with multiple strains, different keys, and different rhythmic feels. On Joseph Samuels’s recording of the tune, Nathan Glantz’s sax turns it into a cantorial aria!

I’m astounded by the musicianship on display, the sense of balance and inventiveness within the convention of verse-chorus variations, how the musicians walk a tightrope between selling the tune and constantly varying it. None of this may be unique, groundbreaking, technically original, or even improvised. I don’t know if this is jazz or how to define the word, but I do believe Richard Feynman when he says that “Everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”

It’s difficult to get past the temporal prejudice that prefers music from the present or music from the past we in the present deem relevant. More importantly, the insistence on timelessness, on transcendence, leaves a lot of music out of the picture. This may be the point, but even if it leaves room for a broad acceptance of what “sends” any listener, what if transcendence isn’t the sole or even the best filter?

Theodore Gracyk, in Listening to Popular Music: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Led Zeppelin, makes a productive point about expecting or only selecting the transcendent:

This fixation distracts us from the possibility that our less intense experiences of music are also aesthetically valuable. Intensity is not the only aesthetic property worth experiencing.

A rarefied definition of “art” often includes a transcendent quality, some ability to take us out of the present and into something supposedly eternal. Popular music can inspire these transcendent moments, but they’re not the most common or even most important aesthetic encounters. Some “good music” can actually be part of the routine, mundane, everyday experience.

Yet fixing art as superior to or constantly having to overcome entertainment already stacks the deck. Gracyk reminds us that “art” has become an honorific, an elevated status that some pop music may or may not reach. But there were also neutral uses of the term as a description for any creative work. The idea that art has to express something about the genius behind it developed in the nineteenth century. Works like R.G. Collingwood’s The Principles of Art differentiated “art” as something that expressed an artist’s emotion versus what is enjoyable or entertaining. Gracyk explains that this was partially a reaction to the expansion of art through commercial avenues. As access to creative works increased and became more common, “art” was associated with something rare, something special, that a genius created to express themselves:

The general theory of expressive genius was originally a reactionary attack on the expanding commercialization of art and culture. If art is the expressive product of genius, deciding that something is art requires recognition of it as something rare and particularly valuable. Entertainment music simply could not count as art, and its lack of genius could be used to make the case against it…

The expressive intent behind a lot of music has always seemed, to me, more a matter of telepathy than musicology. The larger point is that using “art” as an honorific (rather than a classification) has a history; it’s not the only way to define things, and it never was. From another perspective, being “art” doesn’t make a work good or bad; it just means it’s a creative work.

What happens when we listen to all the jazz that’s no longer jazz as a creative work, a musical artifact, as a piece of art (even if it still has no business in Jazz History syllabus)?

For starters, we stop judging it as a jazz performance (or “jazz” as defined decades after the music was performed). Because of its proximity to jazz, a lot of this music is discussed, anthologized, and referenced alongside what historians and musicologists categorize as authentic jazz. That’s no surprise. But it’s also evaluated against jazz.

For example, reading Albert McCarthy discussing the Coon-Sanders Original Nighthawk Orchestra in The Dance Band Era (Chilton, 1982), a reader might conclude that a dance band was not necessarily the same as a jazz band, but the better ones were. It’s a dated example of a still-common way to hear a lot of music:

The [Coon-Sanders] band had no major jazz stylist capable of sustaining lengthy solos. [Arranger and co-leader Joe Sanders] compensated for this by restricting solo space, leaving room instead for frequent breaks…Some of the breaks [may be] fully scored, though they normally give the impression of spontaneity.

Setting aside McCarthy’s verdict on the band’s soloists, the implication is that if the Coon-Sanders band had “better” soloists, it would have sounded different. Soloists were the preferred musical outlet, so reliance on arrangement must have been a compromise.

It’s unclear if McCarthy based his comments on information from Sanders or other band alumni or if he was making an educated guess. So, it’s uncertain whether Sanders was compensating or simply creating the music he and presumably his co-leader, Carlton Coon, wanted to play. It’s even possible that the musicians also wanted to play it regardless of their soloistic capabilities. Whether audiences heard a compromise or even cared is unclear, though Coon and Sanders led one of the most popular dance bands of its time.

Among other reasons for that popularity, McCarthy singles out the group’s “technical expertise and a relaxed rhythm.” Listening to the band’s records, their infectious rhythm and wailing brass and reed sections obviously reflect deep jazz influences. Jazz was an audible influence on dance bands of the twenties and big bands of the swing era (not to mention almost all branches of early- to mid-twentieth-century American popular music).

Defining “jazz” is complicated, involving social issues beyond the notes. However, discussions of the music usually focus on improvisation, blues, and a certain rhythmic flexibility. For McCarthy, Coon-Sanders scores points for its rhythm, but the group’s lack of soloists means it has to lean on scored ensembles rather than improvising soloists. In an ideal musical setting, to McCarthy, a band *should* showcase improvising soloists, but it can end up relying on arrangement and the “impression of spontaneity,” but never the real thing. This is a jazz-centric assumption (which is ironic given the book’s subject).

Twenties “dance bands” like Coon-Sanders, swing era “big bands” in Brian Rust’s American Dance Band Discography (and not in his jazz discography), and similar groups were in the kitchen with jazz, closely watching it cook and borrowing ingredients for a different recipe. But the musical values commonly associated with jazz were just one piece of these non-jazz groups’ music-making. Even in their hottest, jazziest, most swinging moments, there were other considerations, including musical priorities, at play.

The distinction between what does or doesn’t count as jazz and what music or which musicians align with its historical and artistic values involves complex, challenging issues of race, appropriation, economic and social equity, and other cultural-historical issues beyond the sounds heard on the records. The most commercially successful musicians and their fans using “jazz” as a broad label for popular music can seem confusing and even insulting.

Yet here, McCarthy is making a statement about what he hears on a record. He’s considering why a piece of music sounds the way it does and then explaining it based on what he expects jazz to do. Given these groups’ stylistic and historical vicinity to pioneering jazz musicians, often including those artists in their ranks, critics and historians frequently evaluate popular music of the pre-rock era in terms of jazz. They assume bands like Coon-Sanders had (or should have had) the same musical priorities. They either ignore these groups for lacking those musical qualities, reduce their music to a poor attempt at emulating jazz, or dismiss it as cynically adapting jazz’s superficial features for commercial success.

Criticism like this often comes across like evaluating a Chinese restaurant based on its coq au vin. It also presumes a lot about what musicians on the record may have found rewarding or what they thought of written music.

In his dissertation, Written Music in Early Jazz (CUNY, 1997) David Chevan describes how trombonist Clyde Bernhardt sought opportunities that tested his formal musical training alongside playing hot with jazz groups:

By November [1928], [Bernhardt] was more interested in backing shows in clubs than playing dances…Richard Cheatham’s orchestra at the Club Alabam in Newark…excited Bernhardt because of the quality of the ensemble. It “could play behind acts, chorus girls, and full shows. Play in different tempos, different styles, and segue from one to another.”

As part of the Whitman Sisters dance troupe, Bernhardt appreciated the sound of the troupe’s band and a venue’s house orchestra playing together:

When the orchestra played theaters with large house orchestras, the groups were combined, parts were doubled or alternated, and the sound, to Bernhardt’s ears, was “terrific . . . so rich and heavy.”

This was not a musician who just wanted to jam or found orchestrated parts and so-called “commercial music” limiting. Chevan lists several other musicians, including Coleman Hawkins—a crucial figure in the development of improvised jazz saxophone—seeking “environments that would challenge all of their various skills, as readers, interpreters, and improvisers. They did not wish to be confined to a single category of music but thought of themselves, like Willie Humphrey, as ‘musicians.'”

Chevan’s mentioning of Humphrey is a reference to an interview he conducted with the New Orleans clarinetist. When Chevan asked Humphries if Fate Marable hired him based on his skills as jazz musician (presumably meaning some degree of improvisation in up-tempo numbers), Humphreys replied, apparently somewhat annoyed, that “You had to be a musician [Humphrey’s emphasis], ’cause that’s the only way you could get on there; you had to know how to read.” Maybe the Coon-Sanders band just loved being musicians.

Jazz lovers enjoy hunting down an eight-bar hot solo amidst otherwise arranged performances or a wild collectively improvised chorus breaking out in the middle of an otherwise sedate record. Jazz discographies include dance band records based on the proportion of solos heard on the recording. For jazz lovers (like this writer), this approach rewards their focused listening with great music and unexpected instances of a beloved art form. And it’s important for understanding the history of the music now defined as “jazz.” Subjective commentary from nearly a half-century ago about a dance band that may or may not have improvised and might have done it infrequently, poorly, etc. may not matter much when it comes to jazz history. But a critical lens that’s still applied to a lot of music I’m interested in matters to me. For other listeners, maybe the music “speaks for itself.” Music history, scholarship, and criticism enhance my listening. Critical lenses like these foreclose discussion.

How much music has been left out of music (as opposed to cultural) history because it did not sound like jazz as we now understand it? What musicians never made it into jazz history’s halls, and never belonged there even by their own standards, but never found shelter?

For a more recent example of this line of thinking taken to an interesting conclusion, read what Ted Gioia makes of Ben Selvin in his article, “All Bad Music Will Eventually Disappear“:

The biggest hit of 1930 was “Happy Days Are Here Again” by Ben Selvin, but that didn’t match the sales of his most famous song, “Dardanella”—which, by some accounts, was the bestselling tune of the early decades of the twentieth century. How many music fans recognize Ben Selvin—the Taylor Swift of a century ago (I exaggerate, but just slightly). There are still people alive today, who remember those years, but Ben Selvin is already forgotten. Nobody puts “Dardanella” on their playlist. And for a good reason—it’s a piece of lightweight fluff. And the same is true of many other hit songs from the 1920s and 1930s.

Gioia’s larger point is that time sorts the artistic wheat from the chaff of fads, frauds, and mere entertainment:

Time relentlessly destroys almost every artistic reputation. Only a few works survive this brutal process, and they must possess some special merit—something far greater than a newsworthy award or favorable reviews—to gain the allegiance of posterity…We don’t need to destroy the bad stuff, because there’s some kind of quasi-evolutionary process at work that will eliminate it anyway. But goodness is more fragile and needs our support.

I’m not sure what “posterity” means here. Likewise, when Gioia says that “Eddie Fisher might have been a huge star in his day, but today’s musicians are unconvinced of his centrality,” I’m not sure which musicians count or make it onto the committee. Suffice it to say I’m no Ted Gioia, and maybe that’s why I believe “centrality” is not the same thing as “interesting.” I also know people—including knowledgeable musicians and historians—who do put “Dardanella” on their playlist, literally or figuratively, and presumably not their “Lightweight Fluff” playlist or “Music With No Lasting Value” compilation.

About 240K readers subscribe to Gioia’s blog, but we don’t need to review his social media metrics or book sales. It’s safe to say that an impressive amount of people read his work and admire his scholarship and insights. I’m one of them (and I’ll admit to telling him through fan mail). Maybe it’s just more subjective commentary, but some subjectivities make bigger impacts than others. This one makes me wonder if I’m thinking too hard about “fluff.”

Then, I read about the “goodness” that needs our support and realize it’s the other way around: Our support creates the goodness. Gioia says that “These songs have disappeared from the public’s consciousness, and no critic had to lift a finger to make it happen.” But what happens when critics lift their fingers to keep things around?

As for what you call it, I have no idea, but Mark Berresford offers some sound advice regarding labeling:

I prefer the term “syncopated music” because it transcends the rather artificial boundaries that [other labels like early jazz, hot dance, popular music, etc.] imply. It can describe Edgar Cantrell and Richard Williams’s amazing London 1902 banjo/mandolin and vocal recordings, a crossover between minstrel, ragtime, folk and blues. It also includes material by James Europe’s Society Orchestra, George Fishberg’s stomping piano accompaniments to the Trix Sisters on their 1921 recordings and Ory’s Sunshine Orchestra equally well. I think “difference” is a modern concept. At the time it was all the same, just as Paul Whiteman was the “King of Jazz” in the eyes of John Q. Public!

Thank goodness for all the nuanced musical analysis and historical research that independent researchers and historians as well as a few institution-based scholars offer about all that pre-, para-, pseudo-, and non-jazz. I’m flattered knowing that, among my 0.0083% of 240K subscribers, some of them might even be reading this ramble. They understand this music as music. For them, it’s not a compromise, a stylistic stepping stone, or a Bizarro clone.

The broader academic and critical discourse, the books and writers more often found in graduate seminars or national bestseller lists, are not so catholic. That’s unfortunate because they’re missing out. Those conversations seem to go in very different directions depending on whether you mention King Oliver or Earle Oliver, and one road will be rockier. I look for sturdy pavement under both of them.

Thanks for reading.