1927 and the Rise of Modern America

by Charles Shindo

  “Wild Man Blues” (1927) illustrates what made Armstrong unique. While it begins with a traditional polyphonic chorus in which Armstrong on coronet, Johnny Dodds on clarinet, and John Thomas on trombone all play counterpoised melodies, it quickly becomes a vehicle for an extended Armstrong solo that takes up almost two minutes of the just-over-three-minute-long song. The solo demonstrates Armstrong’s ability to elaborate on the melody and to use his coronet in a manner that mimics a blues singer. It is followed by a shorter, similar solo by Dodds and ends with a reprise of the opening chorus. The record is remarkable not for the composition itself but, rather, for the individualistic characteristics of the musicians, especially Armstrong. His uniqueness would be reinforced in the songs in which he sang as well as played, since his gravelly voice was unlike any other popular singer’s, and since he would often sing a solo not of words but of nonsense syllables, as if it were an instrumental solo (a technique that would become known as scat singing).

  Armstrong’s music appealed to the black migrant community in Chicago since it echoed the idioms of southern black music. Drawing from the blues, Dixieland, and New Orleans music and combining them in new ways, Armstrong evoked both black musical tradition and musical modernism; it was both down-home and urban. While classical motifs may have influenced elements of the music, it was for the most part what jazz afficionados dubbed “authentic,” in that it retained more folk elements than studied or commercial elements. This was jazz at its most frenetic and chaotic, and that frenzy and chaos were what made it attractive to its listeners. Many young, classically trained musicians could pick up several books of Louis Armstrong transcriptions, taken from his Okeh recordings, and try to imitate his improvised solos. Some, like Bix Beiderbecke, learned well the soloing techniques of Armstrong and launched careers of their own as “hot” jazz musicians. Like Armstrong, Beiderbecke was able to move between small bands and large orchestras and cover a wide range of musical styles.

  Beiderbecke was a classically trained white musician who sought inspiration from untrained black musicians. He performed with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, as well as recording on his own with small groups and his own trio. In one of his most celebrated works, “In a Mist” (also known as “Bixology”; 1927), the trumpeter Beiderbecke plays solo piano in a manner that recalls the stride and ragtime piano of jazz tradition while also exhibiting the complexity, in terms of key changes, tempo changes, and variation, that would characterize post–World War II styles of jazz playing. The piece’s syncopation is derived from jazz sources, whereas its structure is more classically inspired. This melding of styles and influences was only one way that the definition of jazz expanded beyond the music of New Orleans. The fact that no clear line separated jazz musicians from other musicians is another.

  While many “hot” musicians also played dance music in ballrooms as well as in theater orchestras for silent movies, those who could not read music were not hired by the dance bands and orchestras. There were many practical reasons for this—for example, the demands of a theater orchestra required versatile players able to perform both popular and classical music—but there was also a bias against unschooled musicians, who were seen as unprofessional and a detriment to the profession, and since most of these ear players were African American, this bias often fell along and was reinforced by racial lines. While the majority of this bias stemmed from white booking agents and theater and club owners, some of it had to do with the aspirations of the black middle class in Chicago, which can be seen in the highly influential black newspaper, the Chicago Defender. The paper and its musical columnist Dave Peyton were concerned not only with equality (in pay, opportunities, treatment, and the like) but also with social uplift and refinement, those elements of concern to the black elite who sought to show white America that African Americans could be as sophisticated, refined, and “civilized” as they were. Peyton’s weekly column, The Musical Bunch, admonished black musicians to practice scales and study musical theory, as well as to dress properly and act professionally. While Peyton did acknowledge that race was the reason many black bands did not receive bookings, he felt it was up to the black musicians to prove themselves worthy of consideration and jobs.26 Peyton believed that jazz was an African American cultural creation for which white musicians were taking credit, but he nevertheless favored a style of jazz that would appeal to the largest possible audience, meaning a white audience. Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, often cited as the most blatant offender in usurping jazz from the black community, received Peyton’s praise and admiration primarily because of Whiteman’s success on records and radio, as well as on tour.

  Whiteman’s orchestra was a tightly run business and professional organization that throughout the early 1920s was one of the premier dance bands in the nation. By 1927, Whiteman had parlayed his fame in the ballroom into a musical empire encompassing recordings, live appearances, radio broadcasts, and appearances in Broadway reviews. He also exploited his celebrity to launch a short-lived nightclub in New York and a very successful music publishing company. In 1927 Whiteman’s music ran the gamut of standard dance fare (“Cheerie Beerie Bee,” a waltz), popular tunes from Broadway and Tin Pan Alley (“Manhattan Mary,” the title song from the Broadway show), elaborate orchestrations that mimicked classical pieces (“Mississippi Suite,” a tone poem in four movements), and interpretations of jazz tunes (“Whiteman Stomp,” originally recorded by the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra). Much of this variety had to do with the roles that Whiteman saw himself playing. While popular dance tunes and songs were the practical necessities of a touring orchestra, both the classically inspired and jazz-inspired numbers expressed Whiteman’s desire for an American form of music equal to, but not similar to, European concert music.

  Whiteman loved jazz music as it was played by black musicians, though he did not think it proper for his orchestra to play it in the same manner. His love of jazz can be seen in the increasing number of white jazz musicians in his band, which in 1927 included Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Hoagy Carmichael, and Bix Beiderbecke, and in the increasingly important role soloists took improvising during breaks within the songs. “Whiteman Stomp” illustrates this: the breaks in melody make it difficult to dance to, while the up-tempo pace and lighthearted parody of serious music signal that the piece was meant to be listened to, not just used as background or for dancing. Both Dorsey brothers have solos (saxophonist Jimmy plays an extended solo that weaves in and out of the whole song), adding to the less-structured nature of the song, compared to most Whiteman tunes. The improvisation built into the song was characteristic of the style of jazz played by Armstrong and others playing for primarily black and young white audiences. It is the abilities of the soloists, whether technical or expressive, that make the song what it is, not the composition or harmony of instruments. The individualistic nature of jazz is one of the characteristics that separate it from traditional concert music as well as from popular and dance music, and it is what distinguishes music by Armstrong and other “hot” jazz artists from much of Whiteman’s music and the music of others like him. That Whiteman included these elements is a testament to his desire to take jazz music out of the speakeasies and dance halls and place it on the concert stage.

  This attempt to concertize the music is best seen in such symphonic pieces as George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which Whiteman debuted in 1924 at Aeolian Hall in New York and recorded in 1927, and Ferde Grofé’s four-part “Mississippi Suite” (1927). Grofé’s intention in “Mississippi Suite” was to create a musical journey down the Mississippi River from its source to its end in New Orleans. The first movement, “Father of Waters,” was not originally recorded in 1927, probably because of the lack of space on a 12-inch, 78-rpm disc, but the final three movements, “Huckleberry Finn,” “Old Creole Days,” and “Mardi Gras,” illustrate the attempt to paint a musical portrait of a uniquely American feature using the uniquely American musical style of jazz. The piece uses multiple tempos, along with
syncopation and blues-tinged playing, as well as a wider range of instruments than was common for Whiteman or most popular orchestras (the piece features a bassoon, a whistle, and banjo). In his 1926 book Jazz, cowritten by Mary Margaret McBride, Whiteman describes the history and future of jazz as he saw it. While he acknowledged the African American origins of jazz, stating that “jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains,”27 he does not see it becoming an art form until it is adapted to classical standards of concert music. “Mississippi Suite,” along with Grofé’s “Grand Canyon Suite” (1932), was part of Whiteman’s vision for jazz, an American contribution to classical music. “I am ambitious for jazz to develop always in an American way. I want to see compositions written around the great natural and geographical features of American life—written in the jazz idiom. I believe it would help Americans to appreciate their own country.”28

  This desire for an American form of music equal to but different from European music paralleled the desire of writers and visual artists during the 1920s. Centered in the Harlem neighborhood of uptown New York and focused on fostering “the new Negro,” the Harlem Renaissance sought to elevate African Americans by promoting the contributions to western civilization made by black writers and artists. Key to this undertaking was the determination of what made African American arts and letters different from other American arts and letters. Much of that difference was found in black folk culture, both African American and African. In accord with folklorists studying various world cultures, many black intellectuals believed that the essence of a people (especially an illiterate or nonwesternized people) could be found in such folk expressions as songs, stories, and crafts. James Weldon Johnson found inspiration for his 1927 collection of poems God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse in African American preachers who enraptured congregations with their magnetism, charisma, and showmanship rather than with their theological knowledge. The seven poems, each based on a sermon topic, sought to capture the essence of the black preacher before this style of ministering faded. “The old-time Negro preacher is rapidly passing,” Johnson wrote in the preface. “I have here tried sincerely to fix something of him.”29 Johnson’s attempt to record the essence of the old-time preacher did not include mimicking the way he spoke. Johnson felt that African American poets needed “to find a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without—such as the mere mutilation of English spelling and pronunciation.” Johnson sought “a form that is freer and larger than dialect, but which would still hold the racial flavor; a form expressing the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns of thought and distinctive humor and pathos, too, of the Negro, but which will also be capable of voicing the deepest and highest emotions and aspirations and allow of the widest range of subjects and the widest scope of treatment” (8). In God’s Trombones, Johnson used the form of the “primitive” sermon, as he called it, but he also acknowledged that “in the writing of them [these poems] I have, naturally, felt the influence of the Spirituals” (10).

  Music played an important role in the heritage that black intellectuals sought to internalize, but not jazz. Johnson’s use of spirituals as inspiration was not unique among black intellectuals and artists. “The Spirituals are really the most characteristic product of the race genius as yet in America,” proclaimed Alain Locke in his essay on spirituals in the 1925 anthology and manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance, The New Negro. “They have escaped the lapsing conditions and the fragile vehicle of folk art, and come firmly into the context of formal music.”30 The entry into formal music came primarily by way of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, founded at Fisk University in 1871. While these African American singers sought to make a name for themselves singing classical and contemporary choral arrangements, they became best known for singing spirituals in a concert, as opposed to a religious, setting. But Locke’s hope for a truly American music did not lie with the spirituals themselves; rather, “behind the deceptive simplicity of Negro song lie the richest undeveloped musical resources anywhere available.”31 It was up to educated and “enlightened” composers and musicians to take the raw material provided by black folk music and turn it into music that met the western classical standard. Examples of this process include “From the Land of Dreams” by William Grant Still, the African American protégé of Edgar Varèse, and James Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation: A Negro Sermon.” Folklorist John Wesley Work, whose book Folk Song of the American Negro (1915) traced the development of black folk music, felt that collecting spirituals and folk songs and preserving them for posterity was necessary but said, “[It] can never be the last word in the development of our music. . . . They are the starting point, not our goal; the source, not the issue, of our musical tradition.”32

  The only real mention of jazz in The New Negro came in J. A. Rogers’s essay “Jazz at Home,” in which Rogers treats jazz in much the same way that Locke treated spirituals. He claims that in spite of its spread around the world, jazz “is one part American and three parts American Negro” and “is really at home in its humble native soil wherever the modern unsophisticated Negro feels happy and sings and dances to his mood.”33 While Locke saw spirituals feeding the souls of post–Great War Americans, Rogers saw jazz as “a safety valve for modern machine-ridden and convention-bound society. It is the revolt of the emotions against repression” (217). But instead of springing from religious feeling, as did the spiritual, jazz came from the “barbaric rhythm and exuberance” of “a wild, abandoned dance” of West Africa set into a modern context. “It is a thing of the jungles—modern man-made jungles” (217–218). Because of its primitive parentage, jazz was in greater need of “civilizing” than were spirituals, a process that was beyond the “humble troubadours knowing nothing of written music or composition” who performed jazz. The musical future of jazz was best left to such professionals (both black and white) as Will Marion Cook, Fletcher Henderson, Vincent Lopez, and Paul Whiteman, whose music contained “none of the vulgarities and crudities of the lowly origin or the only too prevalent cheap imitations.” Lopez and Whiteman were singled out by Rogers as the leaders of two white orchestras “that are now demonstrating the finer possibilities of jazz music” (221). Like Whiteman himself, Rogers saw the potential of jazz to be an influence on concert music rather than a substitute for traditional classical music.

  Langston Hughes countered Rogers’s belief that jazz needed civilizing. “Jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America,” Hughes wrote, “the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.” For Hughes jazz was more than an African American creation that had caught the world’s fancy because it relieved people’s anxiety about modern life; it was the very essence of black expression in America. He did not think it should be changed to make it more acceptable to a white audience; rather, he declared, “Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing the Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand.”34 What these “near-intellectuals” needed to understand was the role music played in the lives of modern African Americans. For most black, as well as white, Americans, music was not something to be admired and appreciated like a painting or sculpture, but a part of daily life, an expression. With the greater accessibility of music on records and radio, more people had the opportunity to hear more music. This was especially true in black communities, where entertainment choices were often limited. But for the intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance, black music needed to aspire to being elite culture, not popular culture. In fact, popular culture was detrimental to the goals of the movement, as Rogers points out: “For the Negro himself, jazz is both more and less dangerous than for the white—less, in that he is nervously more in tune with it; more, in that at his average level of economic d
evelopment his amusement life is more open to the forces of social vice” (223). What jazz did offer was its spirit. “The jazz spirit, being primitive, demands more frankness and sincerity,” but, according to Rogers, that spirit needs to be tamed. “Where at present it vulgarizes, with more wholesome growth in the future, it may on the contrary truly democratize. At all events, jazz is a rejuvenation, a recharging of the batteries of civilization with primitive new vigor. It has come to stay, and they are wise, who instead of protesting against it, try to lift and divert it into nobler channels” (223–224).

  Rather than lifting it into “nobler channels,” Hughes used the blues and jazz to infuse his writing with the same spirit as the music, instead of just borrowing the form of the music. In “Song for a Dark Girl” (1927) Hughes presents a blues lament for a black woman whose lover has been lynched:

  Way Down South in Dixie

  (Break the heart of me)

  They hung my black young lover

  To a cross roads tree.35

  Each of the stanzas in the poem begins with the same line, and each “call” is followed by a parenthetical “response,” a device often used in blues and jazz music. While not a formal blues structure, the feeling is undeniably bluesy in its rhythm and use of repetition, and the subject is undeniably African American. This is not poetry removed from the blues; rather, this poem could be sung as a blues song without appearing pretentious.

  This elitist attitude from black intellectuals reinforced to some degree the racist complaints of whites who believed that blacks, in person and in culture, were inferior. By admitting the primitive nature of contemporary black culture and calling for uplift and civilizing, these writers lost sight of the culture that was present in the black community. Just as Dave Peyton called for more professional attitudes and behavior among black musicians, Locke and Rogers called for elevating black culture “up” to the standards of white culture. Hughes lamented this goal, pointing out that a desire to live up to white standards was the result of years of feeling inferior because of white suppression. “I am ashamed,” Hughes wrote, “for the black poet who says, ‘I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet,’ as though his world were not as interesting as any other world.”36