by Unknown
PÈRE VERNIN
When he returned in 1904, he settled down, if we can call it that, at No. 13 rue Ravignan. It is today the Place Émile Goudeau, a little sloping village square on Montmartre with crumbling benches under the trees. He took his meals at Père Vernin’s in the rue Cavalotti, behind the Hippodrome, which was not yet the Cinéma Gaumont. The name of Père Vernin will be historic when all the young men to whom he has served his stew have attained celebrity; he was yet another whose fortune would have been made by Picasso if only the friends he attracted there had been any less hard-up than he, or as honest! That was the time of earnest meetings and gay insouciance. In the rue Ravignan and the rue Cavalotti, towards 1905 and later, poets, painters, musicians and actors flocked to Picasso. Montparnasse, which had only lately become a rival to Montmartre, came with Paul Fort. I used to see there Alfred Jarry, the douanier Rousseau, Georges Enesco, Jules Romains, Vildrac, Marie Laurencin, Fargue, Henri Hertz, Jean Richard Bloch, Georges Duhamel, Roger Allard, Mercereau and a hundred, a thousand others.
You understand that I am speaking of 1905; since then, Picasso has known almost every important artist in Europe. In those days he did not yet know the prodigious Jean Cocteau, nor Stravinsky, nor Satie. After the café of the Père Vernin, it was the turn of Azon’s to be crowded. It was situated on the little square, just opposite the huge brown doorway of the studio. The studio was on the ground floor of a house which, from the square, seemed to have no upper stories, but seen from neighboring streets, revealed at least one. A veritable barn, Picasso’s studio, with beams and walls of ill-joined boards and a crazy floor on which one could not tread at night without awakening the neighbors. I remember that a miserable vegetable-vendor, M. Sorrieul, complained that the chain of Picasso’s dog, the admirable Frika, kept him from sleeping. In that house have lived many men, famous today—among them, Max Orlan, André Salmon, Pierre Reverdy, Van Dongen, Maurice Raynal, Juan Gris. Good Madame Coudray, the concierge, knew how to be kind when the rent was due, and how to tolerate noise. Oh! dear days of hardship, of work, of friendship and of joy. Several studios in the house were cellars, and the stairs were never swept. Everything was of wood.
GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE
Of all the young and brilliant friends who came to the rue Ravignan, Picasso preferred Guillaume Apollinaire, that great lyric poet whom the war, alas! has killed. One day Picasso took me to a bar in the rue d’Amsterdam . . . to let me meet an extraordinary man. This is not the place to describe Guillaume Apollinaire—but how he dazzled us, how he charmed us! and what a place he held in Picasso’s life. What a spectacle to see the friendship of those two geniuses who understood each other so well.
Apollinaire introduced him to Matisse, Derain, Picabia, Vlaminck and Braque. We used to dine often at Matisse’s house, and I believe it was there that Picasso first saw a negro statuette. He grew to admire negro sculpture so much that he gave deep thought to the underlying principles of that art. Although Picasso has never taken me into his confidence as to the origin of his discovery of cubism, I have often thought that it was the application of the rules of negro sculpture which brought it about. He groped a long time toward this discovery, and his work absorbed him to the point of burying him in silence for hours at a time; “Go and amuse yourselves”, he said, in the voice of the genius enslaved by himself, to Apollinaire and me, one evening when he was feverishly covering sheet after sheet of paper with signs and figures—sitting at the table which served also for his meals. Picasso “made” negro art as he “made” the work of Rousseau.
Picasso was also very fond of Salmon. He greatly likes clever people, and Salmon has in his cleverness a combination of tenderness and biting humor which gives great charm to his experience of Parisian life. It would need a volume, I repeat, to tell about Picasso and those who have surrounded him. He reigned on the Butte Montmartre as our Lord reigned in Palestine. Deaths, rivalries, removals, successes, have separated these hard-working young men, but I am persuaded that in his fine apartment on the rue La Boétie, Picasso never thinks without emotion of the friendly ties, the gaiety, and the discoveries of that poor and happy time. For a vivid picture of the life on Montmartre which centered about Picasso, one should read “La Négresse du Sacré Cœur”, a novel by Salmon.
JAZZ: A BRIEF HISTORY
SAMUEL CHOTZINOFF
FROM JUNE 1923
Every so often someone writes to a newspaper about Jazz. The writer, with an almost religious fervor, dissects the current popular tunes, assures us of their utter vulgarity, and finds in them the source of all sorts of contemporary degeneration. The spirits of all the great composers from Bach to Brahms are invoked; with a simple enumeration of these names the writer considers his case settled, and is content to remain, etc., “one who loves music” . . .
There is at once a rush to arms. The head of the Music department of a well-known college thanks the writer for his clarion admonition. It is about time, he thinks, that we return to a state of sanity. There are at present languishing any number of refined American composers whose only chance of a public hearing lies in the hands of a fashionable but ineffectual Society for the Encouragement of American Music. America, he goes on, does nothing for its native Music, while the smallest nation on the Continent builds opera houses, grants subsidies and altogether considers music an important enough business for governmental interference. The result is that, while the German peasant goes about his work whistling the Andante from Brahms’s Fourth, the American man in the street goes about whistling “Stumbling” or “Yoo-Hoo” or whatever vulgarity is at the moment in the ascendant.
To this there is a stinging reply from the president of a popular music-publishing company, insisting that the music published by his house is clean entertainment for the masses. He points to the reverent treatment of the domestic virtues, the deification of parenthood and the little old homestead. To clinch the argument there soon appears an interview with a famous pianist who avers that he is just crazy about Jazz and finds it a great relaxation after a concert of serious music. This sort of thing recurs ad infinitum . . .
THE INVASION OF EUROPE
Meanwhile, the popularity of American jazz music, both here and abroad, is beyond dispute. As far back as 1920—and in the history of Jazz that is a long time—most of the large cities in Europe had succumbed. In the winter of that year I found in most of the cafés of Paris two orchestras: an American Jazz band and the usual French orchestra which played only tango and waltzes. While the French band played, most of the patrons remained at their tables; with the first crash of American banjo and snare-drum, there was a rising en masse and a rush for the floor. In London the better hotels and dance-clubs had imported American bands. In Berlin, though the music was entirely American, the orchestras were native, with a consequent loss, it must be added, of brilliancy and “pep”.
It is not surprising that America and England, nations without a musical culture or tradition of their own, have embraced Jazz; but that France, with a peculiar and definite musical idiom extending over a period of several centuries, and that Germany—which has been to music what Italy has been to painting—have both succumbed so wholly to Jazz music, is astonishing. A serious analysis and appraisal of Jazz should reveal either a degradation of the artistic sensibilities of nations hitherto notable in the development of music, or new and unsuspected merits in the quality of the American creation.
The failure of America to develop a definite musical art is often explained from many points of view by economists, ethnologists, historians and psychologists. But from a musician’s viewpoint, the chief deterrent is the absence of a comprehensive body of folk-tunes. That, as a basis and quarry yielding solid, earthy matter for the artist to weld into whatever form the combination of national and individual genius makes possible, seemed to be non-existent. I say seemed, because we are only now unearthing a mass of such folk-tunes under the name of Negro spirituals which have lain buried for
half a century. In their stead we have had the negro paraphrases of Stephen Foster, a refined drawing-room emanation of these tunes. These have had a tremendous vogue here and have passed for indigenous negro tunes abroad. Though they have charm and a certain simplicity these paraphrases are pure white, and bear the same relation to the real Negro that a current Irish vaudeville song bears to a genuine, ancient Irish folk-tune, like “Molly Brannigan”.
THE BIRTH OF “’LIZA JANE”
But the genuine Negro spirituals (first introduced here by Alma Gluck) are, in their way, comparable to the folk tunes of any European nation. They are the musical expression of a great group of American peasants, who became identified with the native soil through a century of compulsory labor on it. The music that arose from them was a confused mixture of vague African apprehensions, the breath of the fields and a crazy, devout Methodism which had become mystical through a realization that only in religion could they find escape from hopeless slavery. Thus many of these Spirituals attain a lyrical rapture in their adoration of God and their expectation of the promised comforts in Heaven compared with which even the psalms of David seem to lack fire. The sheer musical quality peculiar to these tunes is not less remarkable, and, strange as it may seem, it is this which forms the basis and salient peculiarity of present-day jazz.
The negro spiritual has two characteristics: one, an insistent and lively two-four rhythm which, being started, is carried along by the momentum of its start. This almost living beat is the base for every kind of sentiment and passion the negro slave felt and expressed. It is the frame for the naïve I Got A Shoe and the passionately mystical I Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray. It is this relentless pushing onward of the music that carries swiftly over sentimentalities and strengthens extravagant ecstasies. His confused reaction to a complex and alien religion is borne with a pathetic dignity on the stream of this throbbing mingling of time and sound.
The other characteristic of this music, of course an outgrowth of the first, is its physical effect on the listener. In the negroes themselves it produced a sort of rhapsodical epilepsy of which the lingering effects may be observed in street corner negro revivalists, and indeed in the antics of our own Billy Sunday, who not unwisely adopted the negro idea. The effect of this rhythm on the white race is not less marked, though less extravagantly so. There is an irresistible inclination to bodily time-marking: a lifting of shoulders, a rolling of eyes, a swaying of the head (the latter a conspicuous feature, I believe, of what is known as “collegiate” dancing). There is an inevitable longing to let this extraordinary rhythmic force take possession of one’s body and work its will like the devils that were believed to enter the bodies of sinners in mediaeval or Puritan times. The reaction to this rhythm is universal and as compelling as a natural force.
THE TRIUMPH OF THE NEGRO
At the end of the eighties the negro who had come north discovered the commercial value of his own reaction to his own music. He went on the stage and delighted white audiences with dances of a character elemental, whole-hearted and extravagant, quite alien to the deliberate and lifeless gyrations to which the whites were accustomed. His native religious music could hardly have an appreciable effect on white people or even on the, by this time, free and equal Northern blacks. He retained the vital and living rhythm of his folk-tune as a foundation and lure and, on that, he erected a structure of entertainment that should represent and flatter the taste of the day. He danced the cake-walk, an elaboration of the courtly minuet, which he galvanized into life by a substitution of the two-four for the three-four beat. He “strutted”. He jigged. Soon the demand for negro entertainers outgrew the supply, and white dancers and comedians found it profitable to cork their faces and imitate their more gifted colored competitors. The black-faced minstrel show became the vogue and earned large profits.
Meantime, it must be noted, the advance of the black entertainer in public favor imposed a corresponding deterioration in the quality of his stuff. The native element became threadbare; these shows became whiter and whiter until nothing remained but a rhythmical patter of feet.
THE IRISH MOVEMENT
The quality of the white American contribution to the gaiety of that same period was a mixture of vulgarity and sentimentality, unredeemed by any suggestion of vigor or health. At that time New York was Irish: the Irish immigration had reached its height and the Tammany Hall organization was in complete possession of the city. America was singing Sweet Rosy O’Grady, Tammany and numerous similar ditties. The languid waltz was in the ascendant and the average topical song was at heart a waltz.
The subject matter, when not Irish, sang of the beauties of a Sunday afternoon in the merry month of June and the boundless opportunities for a spoon in Central Park or at the Coney Island sea-’scape. The amorous effects of the waltz were celebrated in the famous Waltz Me Around Again, Willie. A deeper note was struck by things like My Evening Star, which the late Lillian Russell used to sing so devoutly, or in The Mansion of Aching Hearts. The victory over Spain was responsible for a plague of childishly patriotic songs, for the most part in waltz time. Break the News to Mother was both melting and danceable.
All this is not far removed from the present-day lyric; but the difference lies here: in the old songs, the meanness of the musical frame revealed piteously and starkly the utter puerility of the words, whereas the lyric of the contemporary popular song is apt to have a musical setting that is sufficient and altogether absolving.
In the period of which I have been speaking the music of the Broadway revue was a little less obvious than that of the popular song, a little bolder in invention. In the hands of trained musicians like Victor Herbert this music attained a kind of respectable distinction. But it lacked the inherent vitality to give it genuine popularity. The entertainments concocted by George M. Cohan were no better, though he advanced the metronome a few notches . . .
It is worth noticing that this conglomerate of popular art was unknown and unheeded outside America. Here musicians treated it with contempt. It never attained to the dignity of controversy. On the Continent, where there had evolved a lighter music of charm and distinction, it was quite unknown.
MISTER JAZZ HIMSELF
There were at that time in New York, and probably in other cities as well, a number of dance halls of a livelier character than the usual “Academies” frequented by the polite youth of the metropolis. These were in the negro quarter, run by negroes, at first, for their own race. Gradually, white folk, weary of the uninspired, insipid tum-tum-tum of their own dance orchestras, visited these questionable places and discovered a régime of the liveliest description. In smoke-filled back-rooms of saloons circulated dancers engaged in tortuous and unseemly evolutions to the blare of barbaric, blatant orchestras.
The instruments were as nondescript as the players. A piano stripped of its top and bottom coverings, the complete mechanism showing like the skeleton of a prehistoric monster. A few fiddles, a saxophone, a banjo, a drum and endless instruments for the making of sheer noise. Whistles, cymbals, cocoanut shells, rattles, all manipulated with amazing dexterity by the person at the drum. The entire orchestra behaved not unlike a party of dancing dervishes. They sang as they played, leaned forward, stood up in their chairs, moaned, flung instruments into the air and recovered them without missing a beat. This madness communicated itself to the dancers on the floor; they swayed and clung to one another in a manner then considered shocking.
The tunes played by these orchestras were, for the most part, negro improvisations but, also, they “ragged” the current tunes. That is to say, they subjected these tunes to a rhythmical metamorphosis. The erstwhile waltz or two-step, ambling sluggishly along, became, in their hands, a fervent quickstep. The familiar and anaemic complexion of these familiar melodies was charged and quickened with the old irresistible beat of the spiritual . . .
The thing caught on quickly and only waited on some astute person to secure its comp
lete acceptance by toning down its racial extravagances. The transition must not be too abrupt. The new music was presented to the public by Mr. Irving Berlin, not directly as a complete invention of his own, but a sort of innuendo. In Alexander’s Rag-Time Band, Mr. Berlin called universal attention to the quality of a mythical orchestra than which there was none better in the land. All must come and hear this paragon of bands which, in Mr. Berlin’s description, resembled exactly the type of band I have just described. (A later and immensely popular song, The Memphis Blues, describes a band which is not mythical, but actual.) The musical setting of Alexander, although only a respectful paraphrase of a negro rag, was revolutionary. It was, in the current phrase, a riot; and it and its immediate prototypes had no trouble at all in completely replacing the then popular ballad. Moreover, this sort of tune made necessary new and more alluring dance steps, and the Negro walk and shuffle at once took the place of the waltz and two-step. The turkey and other animalian “trots” enjoyed an ubiquitous transplanting from the stuffy negro dens of their birth.