Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Back in London, the Hullo Ragtime and Hullo Tango revues had been superseded by the timely Hullo America. Its star was Elsie Janis, and her big number ‘When I Take My Jazz Band to the Fatherland’. ‘Every Fritz and Hermann’, she sang, ‘will learn to jazz in German. We’re going to say, Now, here’s your chance – dance!’ The Armistice was declared on 11 November 1918, and those soldiers fortunate enough to have survived the inhuman traumas of the Western Front returned to a world that was both strangely familiar, and eerily changed. Women, those delicate flowers whom the troops had been fighting to protect, were now occupied in manual and professional labour, showcasing their new-found independence, demanding the same rights as men. Just as shocking for British troops was the discovery that their homeland had, in their absence, been invaded: not by the accursed Huns, but by a fresh wave of exotic rhythms from the United States, a frenetic melee of musical excitement and jangling nerves which was known by the puzzling name of ‘jazz’.

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  fn1 On consecutive nights in 2005, I watched Bob Dylan, his voice reduced to a husk of its former range and power, deliver three renditions of ‘Positively 4th Street’ so different in tone and emotional impact that it was difficult to believe they were the same song. I like to imagine Jolson smiling in recognition, though perhaps not in blackface.

  1, 2

  JAZZ, SO THE Daily Express explained a few days after the Armistice treaty was signed, was ‘The New Noise That Makes People Gay3’. It was syncopated (hence it was danced ‘out of time’). It was American, for only such a young and carefree society could have concocted anything so free-spirited. It required a band, if such a name could be applied to the cacophonous assemblage of horns, banjos and random kitchen utensils which were tapped, thumped or crashed together in the search for novelty. And it was, without doubt, a menace to the society that had existed before the war began.

  Its effect could be traced on women’s bodies, and the way they used them. ‘You cannot dance the writhing4, wriggling jazz music in the tight, stiff bodices of 1840’, one commentator noted. As corsets were cast off, so were the chaperons who had been accustomed to guard a young woman’s reputation at a pre-war dance. What mattered after the war was not her good name, but her ability to find a partner. Women would dance together until a suitable man intervened. Even married women were not immune to the dancing fever. Officers newly returned from the front, it was noted, were ‘complaining that in her craze5 for the restaurant, the revue, the tea-dance, the jazz or the foxtrot, they find difficulty in recognising the wife they marched to war for’.

  There were now 10% more young women in Britain than young men, and thousands of the latter severely injured or still absent on military service. So any girl who was invited to dance was ‘expected to bring with her6 always her own partner … And when he is found, whether he is liked or disliked personally, he is tolerated if only his step is in sympathy with his finder’s.’ A fresh cast of characters was on display in London society: parlour snakes and lounge lizards; cads and dancing pests; ‘the sleek, well-dressed7 dancing man, with his saponaceous, unctuous suave manner’ and ‘the girl who is asked everywhere8 because she dances well’. One observer complained that ‘some of these girls have not9 even good looks to recommend them, and they are obviously out of place in the clubs and hotels where dancing is conducted’. But class, it seemed, no longer mattered: everything had to bow to the dance and the jazz band.

  ‘Dancing’, a columnist asserted, ‘is the natural sequel10 to war … In a few weeks, when the girls have got used to the boys coming home, dancing will be normal again and only those who love dancing for dancing’s sake will fill our halls and ballrooms. The war dancer will recover, and be the sober, sensible citizen that he was before.’ As victors of the recent conflict, British youth would be the first to resume a life of tranquillity, psychologists believed. In Munich, however, where defeat had led to revolution, people ‘danced night after night11 into the late hours, when the city has been the scene of anarchy, terror and bloodshed. They have discovered the most potent anaesthetic in life, for dancing kills care, kills worry, kills unhappiness … Terrified inhabitants of anarchy-stricken towns, not knowing whether they will be dead in a rough grave on the morrow, dance wildly on through the night, snatching an anodyne from care, drinking to the dregs the glorious opiate of oblivion, conscious of shining eyes, conscious of the lilt of the music, conscious of a drowsy intoxication, forgetting, forgetting …’ In a German satirical newspaper, a cartoon entitled ‘The Demoniacs12’ showed dancers ‘jazzing’ to the music of a starving peasant and a skeleton. ‘In your dance frenzy, you don’t see that your musicians are Hunger and Need!’, read the caption.

  Urban disorder was not sufficient to explain this jazz-induced mania. The music was a ‘mental opiate13’, according to the war poet Paul Bewsher. He courageously located the front line in the war between jazz and civilisation: ‘The call of the music hypnotises the body, as it moves in exact answer to every beat of the melody. In some peculiar way the rhythm of the two, meeting in absolute harmony, drugs the senses. At times I have become almost unconscious in the utter physical satisfaction of inspired movement. The brain is dormant. The body alone lives, ruled no longer by the mind but by the external influence of sound.’

  Unsurprisingly, guardians of public morals were alarmed by the threat posed by jazz. Canon Drummond told the appropriately titled Maidenhead Preventive and Rescue Association that ‘People seem to have lost themselves14 … A nigger dance, to music from every conceivable instrument – not to make music but to make a noise – was a symptom of a very grave disease which was spreading across the country.’ A magistrate in West Ham declared that jazz was simply ‘a bunch of crazy niggers15 accompanied by a noise’. Assorted clerics on both sides of the Atlantic assailed jazz as part of a global Bolshevist conspiracy; or, worse, a symbol of the African jungle besmirching the white man’s world. The jazz musician was ‘an outlaw and a musical bandit16. Like the gunman he is running amok and should be relentlessly put down.’

  There were unlikely defenders of jazz. The Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII) and his brother, Prince Albert (George VI), were evidently aficionados of the jazz band; while the latter was ‘adept at strumming jazz tunes17 on the piano’, the former rarely resisted the opportunity to assault any drum kit within reach of his syncopated royal fingers. Edward was soon dubbed ‘the Jazz Prince’, and his attendance was both a badge of honour for any jazz dance, and also a source of acute anxiety. He was prone to approaching bandleaders with exact instructions as to the tunes that should be performed, and any musicians who were asked to accompany him had to adjust discreetly to his accidental changes of tempo.

  London’s elite appeared to have surrendered to the American invader without the slightest resistance. As early as February 1919, chic dancing establishments in Kensington and Knightsbridge were boasting of their jazz bands, while the Queen of Romania was persuaded to take the floor with the Prince of Wales at a Hyde Park Hotel jazz ball. There were jazz teas; jazz shoes which, at two guineas a pair, wore out more quickly than most girls could afford to replace them; even, at the Dickins & Jones department store, a jazz dress ‘of gold and silver tissue18’. Soon the fashion notices of the London press were filled with suggestions like this: ‘Just one simple, curling19 natural plume set in a gold or enamel holder makes a jazz fan – and no jazz fiend feels in the mode without one. Aesthetically they are right, for barbarian noises call for barbarian adornments, and an ostrich plume is savage beauty in itself.’ By 1920, not only had ‘jazz’ become a synonym for ‘dance’, but it was now a multi-purpose term applied to anything bright, jarring, exotic, unexpected – anything, in other words, that was modern. When the ill-fated peace treaty of Versailles was signed in June 1919, London celebrated with ‘a jazz night – a mad, jolly20 night of frolic and dance’. And within a few weeks, the press was reporting confidently that jazz was dead, or dying, or at least fading, and certainly doomed: ‘Jazz
was overdone during its reign21, and all overdone crazes quickly die.’ Yet the Jazz Age was just about to begin.

  Some of you may wonder22 what ‘Jazz’ means. I don’t know exactly. The word comes from America, and it means – well, whenever you feel particularly ‘dancy’ and excited and you don’t care if it snows ink, then – you are jazzy.

  Children’s author ‘Uncle Dick’, 1919

  There are sufficient creation myths attached to jazz to equal those of the world’s great religions. Even the name was open to multiple interpretations, and several choices of spelling: jazz, of course, but also jass, or jaz. The first author to pen a historical account of the music, as early as 1926, was forced to concede that, however it was spelled, the word ‘has no relations at all23 in the English language’, and must therefore hail from a different culture – Africa, in all probability. Some claimed that there was a musician, perhaps in New Orleans, named Razz, and that a mishearing of ‘Razz’s band’ had resulted in the coining of the term. Others insisted that the musician concerned was Chas Washington, a virtuoso of the drums; or perhaps James Brown, from Dixieland via Chicago, whose given name was commonly abbreviated as ‘Jas’. Links were sought with a ‘jazzbo’, which was either the climax of a vaudeville production, or (on more scholarly evidence) a description of a trumpet with a kazoo tied into its horn. The French verb jaser, meaning to chat or to gossip, was commandeered as a potential source. It was perhaps the slang term for ‘noise’ (members of the various anti-jazz leagues imagined it so). Or, perhaps most convincingly, ‘jazz’ was (like ‘rock ’n’ roll’ to follow) a term connoting sexual intercourse, in this instance used by black Americans as a code during the slavery era.

  If there was little concord about the origins of the word, there was still less harmony when it came to the music it described. Today, we like to imagine we can recognise jazz, in a club or on a film soundtrack: it is a stylistic language that we can decipher easily enough, whether the speaker is mellow (like Wynton Marsalis) or frenzied (like Archie Shepp). But from the late 1910s onwards, no such unanimity could be reached. Indeed, the exact borderlines of jazz were (and still are) hotly debated and contested. The distinction was not just, as the early critics had it, between music that was ‘hot’ (jazz) or ‘sweet’ (not jazz); or which was based upon improvisation (jazz) or tightly scored (not jazz, unless …). Almost as soon as jazz, whatever it was and is, was invented, it proved to be such a mesmerising concept, provoking such ferocity of ownership and identification, that the classification of music into jazz and non-jazz categories took on the air of a moral crusade.

  Jazz was the earliest musical genre to provoke such argument and passion. In that sense, it was the first modern form of popular music: the first to divide and conquer its followers, to be demonised and celebrated in equal measure; to become, by name alone, a badge of pride and a symbol of freedom – artistic, moral and political.

  And yet the vast majority of the music that inspired the outrage of clerics and politicians, and prompted such carefree abandonment of reserve amongst dancers in the years after the end of the Great War, was not – by the aesthetic standards of today, or even those of 1930 – jazz. Its creators may have seen themselves as jazz musicians, but subsequent generations have chosen to rob them of that title. While people believed fervently that they were living through the Jazz Age, more accurately, according to the definitions laid down retrospectively, this was the era of the dance bands, some of whom were bold enough to have flirted with ‘authentic’ jazz music amidst their repeated choruses of what was soon dismissed by critics as ‘slush’.

  In the year 191524, jazz music burst upon the white population of America with the suddenness of a volcanic eruption.

  R. W. S. Mendl, The Appeal of Jazz, 1927

  Some say the Jass band25 originated in Chicago. Chicago says it comes from San Francisco … Anyway, a Jass band is the newest thing in the cabarets, adding greatly to the hilarity thereof. They say the first instrument of the first Jass band was an empty lard can, by humming into which, sounds were produced resembling those of a saxophone with the croup. Since then, the Jass band has grown in size and ferocity.

  Victor catalogue, 1917

  Victor’s tentative exploration of the origins of jazz was designed to promote the first releases by the musicians who comprised (by common if not unanimous consent) the first jazz band to be immortalised on record: the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, or ODJB. (Illustrating the elusive identity of their music, they were the Original Dixieland Jass Band until 1917.) The group’s cornet player and co-founder, Nick LaRocca, claimed that ‘The invention of jazz26 was the result of a mistake. It happened because four other guys and I couldn’t play what we heard at band concerts in New Orleans because we were unable to read music. We tried to play the tunes as we heard them, but they wouldn’t come out.’ It’s a deliberately naïve account, designed to admit that although the ODJB had borrowed from superior black musicians in their home city, they were still the true originators of jazz.

  Not a single historian of jazz would support LaRocca’s account, and with good reason. Yet the ODJB startled those who stumbled across them in New Orleans around 1915, as the journal Talking Machine News recounted: ‘Visitors to the city heard a combination playing dance music of a type they had never heard before, and were fascinated. The players were futurists in music, and they express much the same ideas in noise as the futurists in art express in colour.’ In late 1916, vaudeville stars Arthur Collins and Byron Harlan recorded a novelty tune that was surely inspired by the ODJB: ‘That Funny Jas Band From Dixieland’. Besides some embarrassingly racist (to modern ears) minstrel by-play, the song talked about ‘that harmony queer’ and ‘mad musicians playing rhythm’. There were even a few seconds of authentic ‘hot’ jazz playing to emphasise the point. The Collins/Harlan duet can with some merit be claimed as the first commercial record to offer any jazz musicianship, but it clearly had comic rather than pioneering intent.

  In June 1917, American record-buyers were able to purchase the Joseph C. Smith orchestra’s ‘Havanola Fox-Trot’, a tightly controlled but eminently danceable piece of ensemble playing. The Prince’s Orchestra, a Columbia Records house band named after its founder rather than the jazz-mad Prince of Wales, released ‘American Patrol’, a march tune which would become a staple of the Glenn Miller Orchestra two decades later. And Victor unveiled the ODJB, with a 78 rpm recording of ‘Livery Stable Blues’.

  How did it differ from its contemporaries? It suggested a gang of crazed instrumentalists fighting for supremacy, while still managing to add their voices to something greater than themselves. The canon of classical music – such as the opening movement of Bach’s first ‘Brandenburg’ Concerto – was rich in instances of ensemble playing which involved individual musicians throwing themes, and variations upon themes, back and forth (in faithful reading of a printed score, of course). To the unwary, ‘Livery Stable Blues’ sounded like a free-for-all, a rugby scrum rather than Bach’s polite passing of the teacakes.fn1 What’s obvious in retrospect is that the ODJB are adhering to an agreed structure as closely as any Bach sextet: they all break at the same moment, hold back to let the clarinet squeal or the cornet squawk, maintain a tight melodic pattern, depart and arrive on perfect schedule. There are moments of spontaneity, when they paint over the lines, though the lines are never dissolved. For anyone unversed in the previously undocumented tradition from which the recording came, however, ‘Livery Stable Blues’ represented anarchy, not precision. It was a shock of non-recognition that would be repeated whenever popular music jolted into the future, whether with ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ or ‘Anarchy in the UK’ or ‘Jack Your Body’: all those moments when events that have been occurring outside the viewfinder suddenly loom into sharp focus on the screen.

  Today it is easier to pull the camera back and reveal the wider canvas. In their home town of New Orleans, the ODJB were able to capitalise upon a blend of influences, black and white, English and European
, traditional and brazenly commercial, which by the dawn of the twentieth century evolved into something that we would recognise as jazz. The pianist Jelly Roll Morton insisted on being acclaimed as ‘the Originator of Jazz and Stomps’, who had invented jazz in 1902. His contemporaries remembered the trumpet player Buddy Bolden as the catalyst, his status all the more mythical because (as far as we know) he was never recorded. Before any of this music was preserved, it had crept out of Louisiana to the West Coast, then up the river to Chicago – which is where club owners persuaded white New Orleans bands to venture in 1915–16, and entertainment journalists began to refer to jazz as ‘vaudeville’s newest craze27’. In January 1917, one of those bands reached New York, with a residency at Reisenweber’s restaurant, and within a matter of days they were hired by the Victor label, with the results we have seen. The ODJB was now able to bill itself as America’s highest-earning band, and – although exact sales figures for their debut recording aren’t available, and have often been wildly overestimated – ‘Livery Stable Blues’ undoubtedly brought the nascent sound of jazz into several hundred thousand American homes.

  Their success prompted immediate litigation: there were well-founded copyright disputes over both sides of their record, leading cynics to mutter that perhaps the Dixieland Jazz Band was not so Original after all. As the jazz composer Gunther Schuller astutely summarised, the ODJB’s appeal was rooted in its unoriginality: ‘The ODJB reduced28 New Orleans Negro music to a simplified formula. It took a new idea, an innovation, and reduced it to the kind of compressed, rigid format that could appeal to a mass audience. As such it had a number of sure-fire ingredients, the foremost being a rhythmic momentum that had a physical, even visceral appeal.’ But Schuller concluded that their music exhibited ‘none of the flexibility and occasional subtlety shown by the best Negro bands of the period’. Unfortunately, that could not be demonstrated to anyone who didn’t witness the ‘Negro bands’ in person. Jazz legend has it that black cornet player Freddie Keppard was offered a recording contract in 1916, but turned it down, explaining: ‘We won’t put our stuff29 on records for everybody to steal.’ The honour of making the first black jazz recordings therefore fell not to Keppard, but to Wilbur Sweatman, although ironically there appear to be fewer improvisational passages in his early records than in the ODJB’s.