The Amazing Bud Powell by Ramsey Guthrie P.;

Author:Ramsey, Guthrie P.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

THE BIRTH OF A MODERN JAZZ CRITICISM

During the 1950s, a point at which ideas about modern jazz and the critical discourses surrounding it were settling into a mutually dependent relationship, musicians and writers alike were absorbing and influencing the grander narratives of the “Jazz-Art” idea. Marshall W. Stearns, a PhD in English (Yale, 1942) living in the New York area, had had an interest in jazz since his student days, when he was president of the Hot Clubs of America at Harvard and Yale. Stearns’s The Story of Jazz (1956) reflects his background and training, with its academic thoroughness mixed with a familiarity of live jazz performances in New York. His foreword acknowledges his debt to a wide and diverse swath of scholars, journalists, poets, musicians, and entrepreneurs: Gilbert Chase, Harold Courlander, Ralph Ellison, Leonard Feather, Alan Merriam, Richard A. Waterman, Langston Hughes, W. C. Handy, and Norman Granz, among others.

His first three chapters discuss the prehistory of jazz, and African survivals figure prominently. When he poses the question “What are the roots of jazz and how did they take hold in the New World?,” he is well prepared to answer: “Many African musical characteristics survived in the New World—adapted, blended, and changed to fit new conditions.”92 This statement sets the tone for the musical, sociological, and anthropological journey through the black Atlantic world on which Stearns leads his readers. His insights were not universally shared among jazz writers. Writers such as André Hodeir still depended on reductive speculations such as the following statement: “As we know, the blue notes resulted from the difficulty experienced by the Negro when the hymns taught him by the missionaries made him sing the third and seventh degrees of the scale used in European music, since these degrees do not occur in the primitive five-tone scale.”93

There was another important turn in Jazz-Art at this time. Jazz criticism, according to John Gennari, began to look in the late 1950s like the New Criticism of literary studies in tone, aim, and method. The New Criticism approach, which reached its apex in American universities between the 1930s and 1950s, “held that the primary task of criticism is to elucidate individual works of art.”94 Other related tenets of this method include the autonomy of the work of art, close readings that sought to explain organic unity, and the notion that meaning was determined by the structure of the text. This development was an obvious attempt to gain acceptance for “the study of literature as a legitimate way of acquiring knowledge”95 and as “a way of competing with the hard sciences on its own terms.”96

The important critic Martin Williams’s writings fit in this critical universe.97 He believed that jazz criticism needed to take the music—and itself—more seriously. In his introduction to his Art of Jazz (1959), Williams echoes some of the sentiments Sargeant had expressed two decades earlier: “As they have been telling us for a long time now, jazz is ‘America’s contribution to the arts,’ but, from the way it is most often discussed, one would hardly think so.

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