Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Whiteman’s New York presentation is now remembered solely for its Gershwin premiere. Yet the bandleader intended it as a radical manifesto: a bid to rescue jazz from its raucous, undignified origins in the brothels and bars of Storyville, and establish his ‘symphonic’ variation as its natural successor. He began his recital with what was intended to be a mocking revival of the ODJB’s ‘Livery Stable Blues’, and was alarmed when the audience greeted it with enthusiasm. The programme also included two arrangements of Whiteman’s first hit, ‘Whispering’: one wildly syncopated and ragged; the other gentle and sophisticated, violins to the fore. He politely signalled which of these the audience should find more worthwhile.

  Composer and critic Virgil Thomson complained that when Whiteman approached jazz, he had ‘smoothed its harshness24, taught elegance to its rhythms, blended its jarring polyphonies into an ensemble of mellow harmonic unity … He has suppressed what was striking and original in it, and taught it the manners of Vienna.’ He might have added: in Whiteman’s jazz, there was little room for the music of black America, except as folklore which could be refined into literature. By sidelining the saucepan-and-can clatter of the ODJB in favour of elegant flourishes and smooth rhythmic transitions, Whiteman had created music that did not unsettle any potential audience. He had, effectively, dressed the youthful rebellion of jazz in sensible adult clothes.

  With this move, Whiteman seemed to have repaired a schism that briefly separated young and old. Vaudeville and music hall were intended for adults, but their songs and (with some risqué exceptions) comic routines could appeal to the entire family. The high jinks of the ODJB and their peers were definitely designed to thrill the young, and outrage everyone else. Even amongst the hottest of jazz aficionados, music did not represent an alternative culture or lifestyle; it was merely a diversion, like all forms of entertainment, from the grind of daily life. (For those in the privileged position of not being subject to the indignities of full-time employment, it was the social whirl of jazz dancing, rather than its soundtrack, that constituted their milieu.) In Whiteman’s symphonic jazz, however, there was scope for dancing, for casual listening, and even for the concert hall.

  His example was followed by hundreds of dance bands across the United States. The leading protagonists had enormous followings in their time, but today their names – the likes of Vincent Lopez, Paul Specht, Leo Reisman, Isham Jones, Nat Shilkret and Fred Waring – are little known. Paul Whiteman loomed large over them, in every sense: besides his lavish personality and physique, he became a genuine celebrity, pursued by crowds of admirers. When he returned from a visit to Europe in 1923, his liner was greeted by a vast gathering of worshipful musicians, some of them even taking to the water to signal their appreciation. Yet his rivals were stars in their own right, profiled in popular magazines, their wives and children regarded with reverent curiosity.

  An entire industry was created to promote them, as they crossed America playing one-nighters. Between their dances, variety shows and occasional recitals, they made records – hundreds of them, the top bands often releasing three or four double-sided discs per month. Freshness was everything, as bands required a constant input of songs. During the early 1920s, it was rare for a dance band to make a vocal recording; balancing the sound of an orchestra in the days before electrical recording was challenge enough, without trying to squeeze the human voice into the ‘mix’. But on the road, the most promising singers on the bus would be encouraged to set aside their instruments for a song or two and serenade their audience.

  Bandleaders also seized upon novelties – clip-clop percussion, horns that mimicked animals (a throwback to the ‘Livery Stable Blues’ days) or fire sirens, a number that would allow a section of the orchestra to don fancy hats or blow swanee whistles: anything to send the crowd away with a smile. There was no ethos of constant musical progression in this world, no sense of setting a bold course for the future as the pioneers of jazz and rock did in the decades after the Second World War. Any revolution in sound or stagecraft was almost accidental, intended to boost the bottom line at the expense of their competitors. Yet the music did change, most obviously because the average size of a dance band gradually expanded. The ODJB had thrilled or scandalised people with just six players; by 1926, Whiteman was touring with almost thirty, many of them doubling on a variety of brass and woodwind instruments, and half a dozen offering a sumptuous wash of violins.

  Each band had its trademark effects, each arranger his signature blend of instruments. Yet their repertoires were often strangely similar, just as every Liverpool beat band in 1962 worked slight variations on the same material. They would all draw upon the finest songs to emerge from Tin Pan Alley, and a dozen outfits might simultaneously record the key song from a new Broadway musical. Top outfits were inundated with manuscripts by hopeful publishers, however. Each week, for example, London’s Savoy Orpheans were sent several hundred new songs. At any point, the band could reproduce as many as 1,000 different numbers without needing to consult a score. (Among them was Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which their leader recalled was ‘coldly received25’.)

  Cast adrift amongst thousands of dance-band records from the 1920s, the unwary listener of the twenty-first century might struggle to locate individuality or any reliable method of assessing quality. Some songs – those still acclaimed as standards, having survived nearly a century – leap out, thanks to their familiarity; the rest blur, unless they offer the qualities of spontaneity or rawness that we have come to expect from jazz and rock. But even when these recordings appear to have been mass-produced from a single blueprint, it’s easy to see what held their audience ninety years ago. Each three-minute performance introduces a recognisable melody and a danceable rhythm, and handles both with just enough variety to keep the ear engaged, and feet in motion.

  The prevailing mood was, as Selvin’s Novelty Orchestra put it in 1920, ‘Dance-O-Mania’, and by the end of 1921 more than half of America’s best-selling records would have been classified as ‘jazz’. The remainder spanned an almost unimaginably broad chasm, from Sam Ash’s tribute to the late Enrico Caruso (‘They Needed a Song Bird in Heaven’), to Zez Confrey’s rag piano showcase, ‘Kitten on the Keys’ – perhaps the first instance of an outmoded style being revived for the sake of a nostalgia-hungry audience. In place of the square-footed balladeers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the new entertainers were those with pizzazz. For Al Jolson, every song was an invitation to incite his audience to tears or laughter; Fanny Brice, with ‘My Man’ and ‘Second Hand Rose’ in 1922, staked an early claim to Broadway immortality; Sophie Tucker turned blues and jazz into performance art; and Eddie Cantor tripped through his comic songs as if, in the end, nothing really mattered that much. One moment he was pretending to be outraged about immigrants, in ‘The Argentines, the Portuguese and the Greeks’; the next, the inanity of Tin Pan Alley itself was in his sights, with ‘Yes, I’ve Got the “Yes We Have No Bananas” Blues’. He even provided some political commentary in ‘Oh Gee! Oh Gosh! Oh Golly I’m in Love!’, revealing: ‘I feel as weak and useless as a German mark’. Not that the market for familiar pleasures had died: there were always comic duets from the likes of Ernest Hare and Billy Jones (whose ‘Does the Spearmint Lose its Flavor’ lost its own flavour, when it was covered by Lonnie Donegan thirty-five years later) and Billy Murray and Ed Smalle. In the summer of 1923, when jazz and the strange agony of ‘the blues’ were in keenest vogue, the Irish baritone John McCormack rekindled the mood of his distant youth with a rendition of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s ‘The Lost Chord’ so refined that everything around him must have sounded appallingly intrusive.

  Yet it was jazz and the blues that increasingly held sway in America, as record companies struggled to comprehend that the market for their wares was not single-minded. Many college students relished the warmer varieties of jazz, to the extent that Ivy League Cornell in upstate New York banned its prize athletes from dancing, lest they exhaust themselves in
all-night frenzies. The soundtrack to these orgies might be provided by the ODJB’s ‘Bow Wow Blues’, on which their dog imitations eventually triumphed over their jazz licks, or the Club Royal Orchestra’s homage to the sizzling Valentino film, The Sheik; or one of the bands who aimed themselves shamelessly at the college audience, such as Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians. While it was acceptable for young men to rag, jazz and scamper around the dance floor, women needed to heed the warning offered by Henry Burr’s ‘Just a Girl That Men Forget’, in which party-fuelled flappers were advised that when it came to marriage, boys would brush them aside in favour of ‘an old-fashioned girl with an old-fashioned smile’.

  Burr remained silent on the likely fate of female vaudeville stars, who explored the nascent blues genre with the same gusto their male counterparts displayed when flirting with jazz. Queen of the white blues singers was Marion Harris, whose ‘I’m a Jazz Vampire’ from 1921 celebrated her intoxication while striking a moral tone that would become familiar in subsequent decades: ‘I am all the evil music has’. Irving Berlin offered a pastiche of the style with ‘Home Again Blues’, which was phrased with authentic blues feeling by Aileen Stanley, and more decorously by Frank Crumit.

  None of these performers could hope to rival the African-American blues for emotional commitment and rugged jazz accompaniment. Mamie Smith may have recorded first, and Ethel Waters fused the style with theatrical sophistication, but neither of them matched the presence of Bessie Smith. She debuted with ‘Down Hearted Blues’ in 1923, accompanied solely by Clarence Williams’s piano, and this recording alone would be enough to brand her name indelibly into the history of music. She was a performer at heart, an entertainer without shame; she could walk a high wire over the whirlpools of the heart, letting her audience slip into the maelstrom below. Then, to illustrate that jazz and the blues expressed the same emotions, she ventured into the open melodic terrain of ‘’Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness if I Do’, with such precision that it made her chaotic piano accompaniment irrelevant.

  Such spontaneity was a hallmark of African-American jazz. In the summer of 1925, Bessie Smith revived that touchstone of black music, ‘St Louis Blues’, dragging out the tempo as if she had a slide trombone between her lips and another locked around her feet. Behind her was the melancholy drone of a harmonium; skipping between them, dancing around the melody like a sprite, was a 24-year-old trumpet player named Louis Armstrong. He had first recorded two years earlier with King Oliver’s band, as they rampaged like hooligans through the likes of ‘Dipper Mouth Blues’, and would shortly shape jazz in his own image for eternity. He shared the madcap energy and reckless enthusiasm of his generation: the men in Mamie Smith’s or Ethel Waters’s bands, for example, who borrowed their leaders’ names to make such wild records as ‘Royal Garden Blues’ (on which every musician soloed at once, like Cream at the Fillmore in 1967) and ‘Spread Yo’ Stuff’.

  Clarence Williams echoed their approach when he returned to ‘’Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness’ a few weeks after Smith. His Blue Five stretched the jazz credo to the limit: rather than laying out the tune, and then repeating it with carefully scheduled variations, like the white bands, they barely alluded to it, and then went their own merry way. Not content with trampling joyously across a song that would become a blues standard, they left room for a rhythmic device which had become a sensation on the dance floor in African-American clubs, and would, when carried into polite society, arouse charges of immorality more heinous than those already raised against jazz itself.

  The trouble with the modern girl26 is that she never knows when to stop, and does not stop to think, but lives in a constant whirl of excitement, turning night into day, until her whole vitality is sapped, and she is reduced to a nerve-wracked neurotic condition.

  Letter to Daily Mirror, 1925

  We ought to consign jazz27 to a hotter place than this earth … It is bootleg music … Let us not try to reform jazz, but to stamp it out – to kill it like a rattlesnake.

  Baptist minister Dr John Roach Straton, New York, 1926

  In 1927, Commander Kenworthy, a Conservative Member of Parliament, was defending the rights of moneylenders in the House of Commons. It was true, he admitted, that some people were driven to their graves by the debts they amassed. But he had heard of many instances of death by excessive dancing, and he believed that several fatalities could be attributed to the Charleston alone. (Pause for laughter from the honourable members.)

  His political wit was scarcely more outrageous than the other claims made against what was, after all, nothing more than a dance step. What made the Charleston so appalling (‘the most disgusting thing I have ever witnessed’, so my grandmother was told by her father) was that it encouraged young women – unmarried women – to move their bodies in ways that were positively lascivious. Some even loosened their undergarments before attending a dance, to ensure they could enter fully into the frivolity. From this stemmed every evil that could attend a virgin in such circumstances: not only would she writhe provocatively in front of strange men, but she might begin to experience feelings that were indecent, at best, and should be reserved for those safely committed to matrimony. No wonder that the Charleston was often banned, and that some American universities were said to have prohibited it on architectural grounds, for fear their ancient buildings would crumble beneath a mass display of this monstrous agitation.

  The cause of this farrago of exaggeration and myth was nothing more devilish than a melody from a Broadway revue called (appropriately) Runnin’ Wild. ‘The Charleston’ was first recorded at the end of 1923 by the black bandleader Arthur Gibbs. Not only was it heavily syncopated, but it was studded with pauses and breaks, which shook the dancer off balance (and on to the off-beat). For anyone raised on the predictability of the waltz, or even the foxtrot, its zigzag rhythm was like altering gravity. Within a year or two, the Charleston was forgotten, as its detractors struggled to come to terms with the next outrage: the black bottom. The stomp was equally maligned: even a sympathetic critic could only describe it as ‘a nigger’s shuffling step28 with knees bent’.

  This fresh outbreak of aberrations rekindled the opposition of all those who abhorred the African-American (or indeed African) influence. Jazz, said a London columnist, was the noise of ‘savages’, some of whom ‘still29 live in trees’. The rector of an Oxford college preferred to blame Satan for the ‘Nigger music30’, adding for good measure: ‘Our civilisation is threatened by dreadful noises, horrible motor-traffic, Americanisms and jazz music.’ It was fortunate that he does not seem to have witnessed the Charleston. According to classical musician Sir Henry Conrad, jazz and its ‘attendant immodest dances31’ threatened the basis of the entire British Empire: ‘Coloured races can no longer think the European a super-man, when they find him delighting in the banging of pots and pans and the braying of trombones, and observe him capering with the female of his species to these dissonances. So they cease to respect him and Imperial rule decays.’ (The jibe about ‘pots and pans’ was still being employed against jazz when Hungary relaxed its ban on the genre, after Stalin’s death in 1953.)

  It was ironic that these sweeping generalisations about black culture coincided with what was known retrospectively as the Harlem Renaissance. This involved a flowering in African-American art, literature, political discourse – every facet that made up a modern culture. The poet Langston Hughes, whose first collection was entitled The Weary Blues, wrote: ‘We younger Negro artists32 who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.’

  The leaders of what was then known as the New Negro Movement were uncertain whether jazz was beautiful, or ugly. While it was at root a form of black folk art, it was troublingly commercial in nature. Did it show off the Negro at his most progressive? The answer, in retrospect, is blindingly obvious, as evidenced by the pianist, bandlead
er and composer Duke Ellington. For almost half a century, Ellington led an orchestra of various shapes and tones through arguably the most eclectic catalogue of music ever attributed to a single name: dance tunes, ballads which soon became part of the standard pop repertory, celebrations of black identity, jazz suites, film soundtracks, ‘sacred’ music concertos and exhibitions of jazz musicianship which represented every salient style from ‘hot’ to swing to bop to cool. Though he ran his band with military organisation, he was a generous leader when it came to spotlighting the talents at his disposal (even if he sometimes pocketed their copyrights). His was not a band of fiery spontaneity, like Clarence Williams’s Blue Five or Mamie Smith’s Jazz Hounds: he preferred improvisation to occur within the carefully composed intricacies of his scores. A case in point is the record from summer 1927 which introduced him to a mass audience, ‘East St Louis Toodle-Oo’. Its selling point was, ostensibly, the muted cornet which seemed to speak to the listener. Only with repetition was it apparent how subtly the orchestra was arranged, and how its other voices were aired within those constraints.

  Throughout the late 1920s, the Ellington band were regulars at the Cotton Club in Harlem, an establishment that demonstrated why there were misgivings about the cultural value of jazz. This was no backstreet dive of dubious repute: it could hold 700 customers across two dance floors, and played host to celebrities as diverse as Ernest Hemingway and the Marx Brothers. Unfortunately, all those celebrities were white, there to experience not only the glories of Ellington but also the ‘ethnic’ trimmings – a backdrop which evoked the Deep South of the slave era, barely clothed (black) dancing girls, and comic skits which reduced the black man to his African roots. Worse still, as one of Ellington’s biographers noted, ‘The venue’s exclusionary policies33 and excessive prices barred blacks from the club, except for the rich and famous, and even those visits were rare. There existed a separate section for the black families of performers.’ This was not so much a renaissance, Ellington aside, as a caricature.