Fred Turner on Jazz

Today's lunch and slice of information features Frederick Turner visiting lecturer and the American Studies Department at University of New Mexico. For almost 20 years, Frederick Turner has conducted field work and research on traditional jazz. He's written several essays on the subject and is the author of a forthcoming book. Remembering song encounters with the New Orleans musical tradition soon to be published by Viking Press in New York. Here's Fred Turner. It's often been observed that the degree of popularity of any particular item personality or subject is usually roughly equivalent to the degree of

popular misconceptions entertained about it. Just at the moment we're all talking about energy and it's probably a safe venture. It's a level of nonsense. Noise on the subject has never been greater. Just now too, the music called jazz is enjoying one of its periodic mild swells of popularity and we're talking about that. Most of us, if asked, could probably provide a brief outline of its history and major figures. We'd start with New Orleans and remarked that the music was spawned a word that we usually reserve for this music. Spawn there in the city's red light district, Storyville. That during the years surrounding World War I, it beat its way of river via the paddle wheel steamer to Chicago where in the persons of King Oliver, Louis Armstrong and Gillette Royal Martin, it achieved its popularity. In the Chicago days of prohibitions, speakeasies, bootleg booze, the music flourished and here the name

is begin to change to the original Bixieland Jazz Band, Bix Byter Beck, the Austin High Gang, and as the 20s become the 30s, Benny Goodman. After this mythical period, our sense of the music's history might become even rougher. Bebop, Brubeck, Benson, that might about do it for most of us. That is all but the aficionados, a term like spawn that is usually used in connection with this music, one reserved for fans and both fights or jazz. By introducing the topic with the observation about the close company kept by popularity and popular misconceptions, I've already indicated my belief that such a rough outline, as here imagined, is indeed shot through with misconceptions. In a way, there's nothing disturbing about this and among the other wrongs currently calling for our attention, it might rank well down the list. After all, if we occasionally appreciate the music itself, is it really so important that

we know anything more about its history? It's roots, it's essence. Life is short enough and there are many claims on our two brief time here. Besides, there can be few more saddening contrast in that between the historians of this music and the music itself, which seems in its vibrant creativity to have nothing to do with history, which as a discipline itself is always a little bit behind the beat. Yet, I think there is sufficient reason for us to inquire further into our awareness of jazz's history, our easiest scent to the rough stereotypic history we perpetuate. And this occasion would seem to be as fit as any to pose some questions about our awareness of jazz and its history, about that stereotypic history itself, and about the nature of the music's popularity among us. For openers, we could begin with the name given the music, jazz. This is a curious word with an etymology as tangled and obscure as that music it would describe and

label, in which the music itself has had to bear as its own exterior burden. Here even our most prestigious dictionaries are of only primitive assistance, reflecting in their scholarly ignorance a deep river of arrogance that runs from the Gambia, the Niger, the Volta rivers of West Africa, to the river systems of the southern U.S. that were used to transport the slaves we brought, and who lifted their voices along these water courses in the first lines of the blues. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, can only tell us at the word is of uncertain origin, and that it seems date from around 1918. Taking our clue from the fact that the word was first commonly spelled jazz, J-A-S-S, we can do a little better than the OED I think. We can guess that at some point in the music's formative years, the association was made between the music and the environment in which it was forced to flourish, the world of vice and organized

crime. There is in this world a word, which is very close to the word jazz, and which some of our fraternity men may indeed have heard of. There is also a word which means something like sexual expertise or time. He makes good jazz with the women. The name is stuck to the music, obscurally reminding us of what we think we know about its origins, and reminding us to of what many of us have learned at first hand about the conditions in which it is still commonly heard, the urban nightclub, which indeed has a whorehouse mentality, burned the sucker once, you won't get a second chance at him. As Max Roach, the great modernist percussionist once said to me of this persistent condition in which his music exists, the music still back where it always has been in the basement by the toilet. On aware of the words etymology, we are yet constantly reminded of its negative connotations. When, for example, the Wall Street Journal's ad agency

devised its current campaign of celebrity endorsements, it led with some currently fashionable but forgettable face telling us that the journal was quote, not jazz-y, as if we didn't know. Still, it was reassuring to be reminded that this paper delivers the straight goods. If we say don't hand me that jazz, we are saying don't try to disguise your shabby message or excuse in all this chin music. And the last thing, a struggling corporation like Chrysler would now want to tell us about his 81 models, would be that they are all jazzed up. As for the musicians themselves, the early ones called their music ragtime, while current ones like Roach and Archie Shep are searching for a term that will ease them and their art of the burden it has had to carry. As for the place of origin, it's true the New Orleans provided the vital place of fusion, the gumbo pot we might say, where so

many of the ingredients of this music came together. Work songs, field hollers, praise songs, spirituals, rudimentary blues, European folk music coming out of the country to the city, street cries, march music, opera, ballroom music from the city itself, plus the vital infusion of Afro Latin music from the Caribbean Islands. Yet we also know enough now, just enough, to begin to understand that this music wasn't created at one place and one time. That it was a result and a product of the advent of Africans into the new world, that this began early in the 16th century and continued until the eve of the Civil War, despite the outlawing of the international slave trade in 1807. That it was Africans becoming Afro-Americans who improvised the synthesis that eventually became a recognized style of music, a way of playing anything from opera to a quadril to the blues, and that this happened all over the South and

the Caribbean over a period of more than 300 years. We are also just beginning to understand how much of West African culture was tenaciously retained by the slaves and by the descendants of the slaves. How much their improvisations followed ancient cultural lines. I'm reminded here of the TV series roots that made a kind of singular hero of Kuntakinte, the slave who would not be called Toby. What we need to recognize, not only in this connection of music, but in general, we need to recognize how much Kuntakinte was typical rather than singular. Still, we can also see in these widening horizons that New Orleans was the place. Here, the first great improvisers emerged, feeding on each other, hooked by an excited awareness they were creating something unique and distinctive. From here, the first great disseminators went out into the rest of the country taking that New Orleans sound and style. Here, the first important

bands were formed of men who had developed a common sense of style and purpose. And here, too, the music found its first audiences. Mostly, these audiences seem to have been persons of color, a southernism that is useful here to denote the various quasi-legal shadings that a couple of centuries of New Orleans life had produced. Ocderoons, quadroons, mulattoes, blacks, the mixed bloods often referring to themselves as colored creoles, the black segregated even from these in the old uptown section of the city. What we know as Storyville was a relatively late phenomenon in New Orleans, and except for horrors, musicians, and maintenance people, it was mostly off-limits to persons of color. Much later, when asked about Storyville, the early basis pops foster, thought it must have been some town he'd played with a band, for he and the other men called Storyville, the district. The best, that is, the highest-paying jobs were there in the district,

it's true, but the basis of the music was elsewhere at the beginning. It was in the strolling string bands and might serenade neighborhood fish fries. It was country boys, out of the woods, downriver, who had played dance dates on dusty lots at the corners of all the old uptown section. And it was in the cabaret phrase that opened in the post-reconstruction years to take the money and the time of those now so perilously free. Three-room jobs, these cabaret's usually were, a bar in front, a gambling room in the middle, and a backroom for the dancers and the musicians. There were, of course, other places where the music got its first exposure, the black dance halls of the uptown area, at Spanish fort, the huge sprawling amusement park on the shores of Lake Pontortrain, in the parades for which all New Orleans colored and whitehead such a mania, and in the funerals where the city's Afro-Americans re-enacted and reaffirmed the Afro portioned their heritage by sending off the deceased to the sounds of communal

festivity. But whatever the nature of these other sorts of exposure, and however high the standard of musicianship, this music in a place of its birth, the place of its fusion, was early stamped as low, dirty, honky-tonk, whorehouse music. A white man might spend his evening hours listening to a colored band in the Storyville cabaret. He might plunk down solid silver dollars to hear jelly roll, Tony Jackson sing and play, everything from opera to scatological blues in the parlors of the high-class whorehouses along Basin Street. He might even hire a small string combo to serenade him and his family and friends at their summer camp on the lake. But he would not admit this music to the ranks of polite white society nor would he dane to consider it a form of art. It was even so early stamped as illegitimate as honky-tonk music. Doubly ironic when we consider the fact that the environment of jazz in New Orleans was the only environment permitted it. Like other matters there,

it was segregated into specific places, and then judged for having been found there. Listen, for example, to the New Orleans pick-a-yoon, the city's leading newspaper, June 17, 1917. Listen to it, play its version of this music in an editorial entitled Jazz, J.A.S.S. and Jazzism. Why is the jazz music, says the editorial, and wherefor the jazz band? As well ask why is the dime novel or the grease-dripping donut? All are manifestations of a low streak in man's taste that has not yet come out in civilization's wash. Indeed one might go farther and say that jazz music is the indecent stories syncopated and counter-pointed. Like the improper anecdote also in its youth, it was listened to blushingly behind closed doors and drawn curtains. But like all vice, it grew bolder until it dared decent surroundings, and there was tolerated because of its oddity. We usually

think of peoples goes on the editorial as either musical or non-musical, as if there were a simple line separating two great classes. The fact is, however, that there are many mansions in the house of the muses. In this house there is, however, a basement, a kind of servants' hall of rhythm. It is here we hear the home of the Indian dance, the throb over the Oriental tambourines, and kettle drums, the clatter of clogs, the click of Slavic heels, the thumpty-tumpty of the Negro banjo. Prominently in the basement hall of rhythm is found rag time, and of those most devoted to the cult of the displaced accent, there has developed a brotherhood of those who, devoid of harmonic and even a melodic instinct, love to fairly wallow in noise. On certain natures sound loud and meaningless has an exciting almost intoxicating effect, like crude colors and strong perfume, the sight of flesh or the sadistic pleasure in blood. To such as these, jazz music

is in delight and a dance to the unstable bray of the sack, but gives essential delight more intense and quite different, from the langer of a Viennese waltz, or the refined sentiment and respectful emotion of an 18th century minuet. In the matter of jazz, the editorial concludes New Orleans is particularly interested since it has widely been suggested this particular form of musical vice had its birth in this city, that it came in fact from doubtful surroundings in our slums. We do not recognize the honor of parenthood, but with such a story and circulation, it behooves us to be the last to accept this atrocity in polite society, and where it is crept in, we should make it a point of civic honor to suppress it. Its musical value is nil and its possibilities of harm are great. If this piece of ancient journalism now sounds crudely in our ears, it may only be because it puts too blatantly, but many obviously have felt about

jazz, but would prefer not to state. And when we reflect on the subsequent history of the music, once the leading players began leaving New Orleans, for the north and the west coast, we can see, if we know enough, that this is hardly an instance of merely local prejudice. For the environment of the music in Chicago was almost exactly the same as it had been in New Orleans, and Jelly Roll Morton, going west, played rundown nightclubs in a suburb of Los Angeles called Watts, and hustled liquor and women to make ends meet. Indeed, the first group to make a real success with this music was one which styled itself the original Dixieland Jazz Band, and all white group from New Orleans, who copied out the tunes of the black players they so despised, stylized these, trivialized them, and became international celebrities. With certain rare exceptions, this has been the peculiar fate of this music ever

since, that it could only win acceptance in America by somehow masking its true nature. Whereas rock has won huge acceptance with an almost ununderable assault upon the ears, hard rock, acid rock, punk rock, jazz in order to gain a far more modest hearing as had to mute and heavily stylize itself. When we think of those who have been most popular in the American musical scene using jazz or elements of jazz, we must be struck by how many have been white and by the sounds they have orchestrated. Compare, for example, Paul Whitman's early success in the 20s with his black competitor King Oliver. Compare the careers in the successes and the sounds of Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, even Benny Goodman, with the black bands their contemporaries Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Compare Dave Brubeck and Cecil Taylor, or Al Hurt and Dizzy Gillespie. Such comparisons must give us some pause for thought. They cause us to ask what it is in this music,

the music in its authentic state, that makes so many prefer the homogenized product with the artificial flavoring. Can it really be that the music's name and its original and inevitable environment still tainted, still reach out like the dead hand of the past to strangle it? Why is it that so many of its greatest artists have died broke, dishonored, unknown, and so very young? And why is it that in what will be soon the century of its existence, the music still awaits its first great historian? And we think of all the unworthy subjects that have attracted the talents of great writers over this span of time. We must be astonished at this monument to the human spirit, to creativity in the midst of the most adverse cultural conditions, has been left to hacks, to buffs, to G. Wiz historians. Near the end of his long life, Sydney Bache, the great New Orleans Reed player, told an interviewer in Paris that he had spent years wondering about

these things. People he said asked me if it's something in the music. How do you answer that? Sometimes I lay at night thinking about it. Thinking someday I'll get the right answer. In that interview and the others that went into what became Bache's autobiography, the artist supplied many possible answers, but none were better than when he ventured that this music is remembering music, the memory of a large swath of American history, the memory of wrong, and of creative struggle against wrong. When a blues is good, said the old man, who had chosen to live out the last years of his life away from America, and who now lies in a black polished tomb outside Paris, when a blues is good, that kind of memory just grows up inside it. That's when you can't help yourself. You just can't ever forget it. That was Fred Rick Turner, visiting lecturer in the American Studies

Department at University of New Mexico. This program was produced at K-U-N-M-Albach Curtain.