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The Bad Plus - Prehensile Dream

Racial Tension in the Swing Era

            During the 1920’s, jazz not only was procured by whites and blacks, but came to symbolize a decade of dancing. The increased white interest in jazz resulted in an influx of white jazz musicians by the mid 1930’s. Marking the beginning of the “swing era,” this period saw the development of the big band. For the first time, white musicians attained the same level of prominence as blacks.

            Indeed, the “King of Swing” was bandleader Benny Goodman, a white clarinetist. Goodman premiered jazz in Carnegie Hall in a 1938 concert, breaking the label that jazz was a low-brow form of entertainment (lecture 14 Feb). Goodman also integrated black and white musicians in his band. Like other white bandleaders, Goodman enjoyed better pay, job security, and mainstream acceptance than his black colleagues (Gioia 142). At the Savoy, a black Harlem club, Goodman musically battled against black drummer and bandleader Chick Webb in 1936. Goodman summarily lost, suggesting that the white bandleader’s advantage was one of race, not skill (lecture 14 Feb).

            In October of 1929, the stock market crashed, beginning the Great Depression. Recently, the radio had become available as a means of listening to music for the masses. The economic downturn caused the radio to largely replace the record because a radio was a one-time purchase, whereas records needed to be continually purchased in order to listen to new music. Previously, music could be recorded and distributed entirely within the black community. However, radio stations were owned by whites. Since blacks were denied gigs at, for instance, hotels, survival for a black musician meant gaining the influence and recognition to be played on a white station in favor of white musicians (Swing Changes 107).

            Duke Ellington did so by conceding his image and repertoire to white entrepreneurs, signing with a white agent, Irving Mills (Gioia 123). Mills not only helped Ellington procure deals with record companies and venue owners, but helped guide Ellington’s work to reflect what would be popular. However, Ellington had to give Mills an even share of profit and creative rights in return (Gioia 130). Ellington thrived as a bandleader at the Cotton Club, a nightclub owned by mobster Owney Madden which exclusively admitted whites (Gioia 126). However, he was conscious that he abandoned the black community, perhaps inspiring the dissonance and moodiness in, as an example, his melancholy composition “Black Beauty” (Gioia 128).

            Critics, typically middle class whites, worked from an entirely different social pedestal than did black musicians, constituting a lack of “embedded criticality” (lecture 14 Feb.), a shared sentiment between critic and musician. This created an aesthetic schism between black ideals and white consumption. John Hammond, the most important critic of the era, was responsible for discovering Benny Goodman and Count Basie among others (Swing Changes 56). Raised in a mansion, Hammond was an upper class white member of the Vanderbilt family (Swing Changes 55). Hammond became connected with the Popular Front, a communist organization which equated anti-Fascism with anti-racism (Swing Changes 62). Even though he believed that blacks were racially superior musicians, Hammond’s socio-economic position was detached from the problems faced by black musicians. Therefore those who prospered under his patronage were not necessarily chosen by virtue intrinsic to the black community.

            During the swing era, blacks competed with white musicians for white approval. Because they were judged with aesthetics not intrinsic to their background, blacks felt a great racial tension between a duty to their culture and a need to prosper. This tension was an artistic faucet of the dual consciousness between American and African described by W. E. B. Du Bois.

New York Jazz

            King Oliver left New Orleans in 1919, to be joined in Chicago three years later by Louis Armstrong (The Best of Jazz “King Oliver” 37). There, Oliver would develop a virtuosic paradigm of a soloist improvising in front of supporting musicians, while Armstrong would integrate melodicism into Oliver’s style (The Best of Jazz “King Oliver” 41). Meanwhile, local white groups like the Austin High School Gang helped to spread jazz into venues with prohibitory policies towards black musicians (The Best of Jazz “The Chicagoans” 154). Through a fusion of Creole, folk, and blues influences, Chicago jazz became a versatile music style suitable for both expression and entertainment.

            New York City, though, was the most important center in the development of jazz during the mid to late twenties. Jazz in Harlem was spawned from a drastically different set of influences than was the New Orleans-Chicago jazz heredity. Like in Chicago, musicians in New York drew inspiration from the blues, and New York jazz was even more influenced by ragtime than in Chicago—after all, the king of ragtime, Scott Joplin, lived in New York for the last decade of his life. Yet it was classical European music which outstandingly influenced jazz in New York. Harlem lent jazz the high class demographic needed for the music to jump from back alley blue collar entertainment to center stage as a viable mode of artistic output.

            The main force in mid-twenties New York jazz was stride piano. Stride blended ragtime with the influence of black migrants bearing the blues. However, European influence separated the auditory experience of stride from contemporaneous styles. James P. Johnson, the progenitor of stride piano, once commented, “The reason the New York boys became such high class musicians was because the New York piano was developed by the European method, system and style….The ragtime player had to live up to that standard” (Gioia 97). Johnson was known for ragging up canonical European works into “hot” versions worthy of a dance (The Best of Jazz “James P. Johnson” 25).

                        By the 1920’s, Harlem had developed a dualistic demographic consisting of poor migrants who were known for holding rent parties, and of middle class blacks who carried the artistic tastes associated with the Harlem renaissance (Gioia 94). Because of this duality, stride piano needed, simply for commercial viability, to seamlessly blend from appealing to those accustomed to “art music” to entertaining rent party-goers. To the date, ragtime and New Orleans-Chicago jazz had never managed (and perhaps even avoided) to find a moderate perch between high- and low-brow approbation (Gioia 96).

            Art Tatum’s music characterizes the relationship between stride piano and its ancestral styles. Tatum, a late entrant to Harlem stride, was continually in a dialogic discourse with multiple lineages of previous music. In congruence with Bakhtin’s literary theory, Tatum balanced his own desire for innovation with inspiration from previous composers. Tatum always adhered to the precedent by earlier stride artists like Johnson. Franz Liszt—the Entertainer of the classical era—motivated Tatum’s flashy technique (Gioia 102). Tatum’s repertoire was built on popular songs, connecting him to his audience (Gioia 104). The dialogism between Tatum and his contemporaries and precursors allowed his innovation to be socially relevant.

            New York jazz served as an antithesis to its Midwestern analogue—Chicago jazz specialized in expression and the brass solo instrument. New York jazz was fast, chromatic, highly technical, and required immense precision to effectuate daring leaps and dense harmonies. The later synthesis of New York jazz with the Chicago style would eventually yield the bebop era.