The Pop of Yestercentury

If a critic makes an innocent typo today, you can leave a comment, post a response, or email an entire argument. Yet the critic who slammed your favorite album decades before your birth can’t even get a curt letter. Ironically, their comments might be the most grating. Yesterday’s criticism sometimes calcifies into common wisdom. 

Take George Frazier’s record review column in the December 1933 issue of Jazz Tango Dancing. It includes coverage of Columbia 2835-D: two sides by Benny Goodman directing a studio group including Gene Krupa, Joe Sullivan, and Jack Teagarden. Today, it seems like a pickup group of legends in the making. At the time, it was a new record to review, and it didn’t impress Frazier.

He compliments all the familiar names. Tenor saxophonist Art Karle earns special praise. Frazier also gives Columbia credit for its recent jazz releases. He’s otherwise dismissive of both “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues” and “Ain’t Cha’ Glad.” The review ends by pronouncing the disc “far superior to the general run of current American recordings,” but that’s an afterthought. Immediately before, in the second-to-last sentence, Frazier warns that “it would be wrong to imply that this disc is absolutely without any commercial taint.”

There’s nothing unusual or elitist about assessing jazz content for a jazz magazine. But Frazier goes beyond stylistic analysis. He’s not just suggesting readers endure those parts. He’s providing a warning. This jazz is “tainted” with popular elements. It’s the aesthetic equivalent of noting the presence of gluten to someone with celiac disease.

He singles out Teagarden’s concluding cadenza on “Ain’t ‘Cha Glad” as “a display of technique rather than [an] intrinsic hot break” right before bringing up the commercial contamination. Maybe the muted trumpets behind Goodman’s first chorus reminded him of “sweet” bands—another category established by filtration from what Frazier later calls the “true hot.” 

It’s harder to parse the objections to “I Gotta’ Right to Sing the Blues.” Frazier might have disliked its arranged introduction, prominent ensemble backgrounds, or the big theatrical band climaxes at the end of soloists’ phrases. He also finds Teagarden’s voice insufficiently rich.

Maybe Teagarden was mellowing his sound for this pop tune. A knowledgeable friend points out that Goodman kept his ears on the market. The musicians may not have noticed or even cared about the commercial connotations of Arthur Schutt’s arrangements. Maybe they appreciated touches like the coppery brass pecks behind the warm grain of Goodman’s clarinet. Goodman, Krupa, Schutt, and Teagarden worked together regularly. It’s unlikely anyone was complaining about playing these charts. 

Were these musicians adding these touches to achieve a pop sound? Or were they simply musicians making musical choices who happened to be waxing a record aimed at a broad audience? Were any of these labels on the musicians’ minds? Did Teagarden simply need a glass of water? As this friend also points out, these gentlemen may have been grateful just to play music for money during the Great Depression.  

Frazier likely didn’t have room to outline every offending touch, and it might have been unnecessary. There was enough there—meaning anything there—to remind listeners of other music that wasn’t hot or hip. Frazier wasn’t the first or last critic concerned with purifying jazz of its commercial contaminants, but this is a pristine sample in the archaeology of this critical tendency.

That tendency arose for valid reasons. Scholars often point out that the word “jazz” was once a marketing term as well as a musical label. It signified both Johnny Dodds’s and Ted Lewis’s clarinets. Some people just thought of Lewis’s top hat and stage comedy. Jazz lovers like Frazier had seen promoters, fans, journalists, and even musicians label almost any form of upbeat popular music as “jazz.”  By 1933, if not sooner, enough seemed to be enough for them. They wanted to set the public straight. They had to filter out “commercial” elements from an art form they loved that was still in its early stages of development. Frazier was helping people find real jazz and avoid—or at least be aware of—pop filler. It’s criticism as a buying guide, a consumer report for art music.

Opinions like these trickle down and embed themselves in discussions about music until they seem basic to the conversation. Gunther Schuller published Early Jazz three and a half decades after Frazier’s article. Reading Schuller’s book 60 years later, the stakes go beyond taste. Schuller mentions the “intrusion” by or the “intruder” of “Tin Pan Alley,” “commercial popular music,” and similar music throughout the book. Noting that “the first inroads of popular music into jazz” came early in the music’s history, Schuller surmises that “it was as if pop music and commercial interests had been standing by in the wings, ready to move in on the fledgling music.”  

The implication was that, during the twenties, a calculating, even predatory, entertainment industry forced things that didn’t belong into jazz without the creative input of jazz musicians. Seen in this light, enjoying a pop act is more than square; it’s fraternizing with the enemy. Pity the poor musicians who wanted to play the stuff. 

Early Jazz is now one of the most influential works of jazz history. 50 years after Frazier’s passing, this sharp distinction between “pop” and “jazz,” between commerce and art, remains popular enough. People like to dismiss criticism, and someone’s distaste shouldn’t affect your taste, but it’s interesting to note how often you slip on the spilled ink.

More recently, in 2023, one scholar noted that “in the 1920s, jazz arranging gave white men the ability to own and accumulate musical property and therefore expand their control over the market.” There’s a lot to discuss in this single phrase, let alone the rest of the paper. The cultural issues behind jazz history are important, and this paper focuses on a broader discussion of them. 

Yet this statement resembles a common musical argument about this period: bands got bigger, arrangements got more complicated, everyone was trying to get in on the jazz act, and audiences couldn’t discern the musical quality of Paul Whiteman versus Duke Ellington (which is like asking someone to say which love story is best).  

To this scholar’s credit, other parts of their paper critique the assumption that arrangement is by definition commercial and antithetical to real jazz. They also don’t rule out the possibility that people can have profit motives and creative goals. Yet some critics are not as fair. To some listeners, it doesn’t take much to stamp a musician as a sell-out, and why bother listening to a sell-out? 

These are some particularly illustrative but admittedly isolated examples. There are plenty more in academic journals and internet forums. In contrast to these assumptions about commercial music, bandleader Harold Leonard had high hopes for music that was sonic furniture to many people.

As Colin Hancock’s outstanding bio and playlist explain, Leonard was an incredibly popular musician in his time, leading a band that could get hot but likely didn’t achieve commercial success strictly playing jazz. In a column directed specifically at musicians leading hotel dance orchestras, he closes with a section titled “Leader Must Like His Work,” advising his fellow working musicians to respect the music even as they watch their bottom line:

Before closing, however, I want to stress one important point—the dance orchestra leader must be sincere. He must have a constant interest in his work, a love for it akin to that of the leader of a symphony orchestra. He must appreciate and study the music he plays and concentrate on the methods which he thinks will aid in the betterment of his orchestra’s playing. Only in this way can the dread monotony, the feeling of “the same old thing” that has brought grief to many a good orchestra, be avoided. The orchestra leader must be so intensely interested in his work, so absorbed in a constant attempt to improve the playing of his orchestra that any feeling of monotony will be lost in his love and appreciation of the work he is doing.

Frazier might have hated Leonard’s music, but even he would have appreciated the intent behind it. The supposed “taint” of commercialism could have just been different but equally sincere music. Whatever the commercial sound is at any given time, does it also get to be sound?