The record changer (Jan-Dec 1944)

The Record Changer, August 1944 Jazz, as a vocal style, stems from the worksongs, shouts, spirituals, lullabies, rhymes and play songs of the plantation Negro. The average slave owner encouraged his Negroes to sing and play because it cost him nothing and kept them from rebellious thoughts. As urbanization begins, a Negro underworld of pimps, gamblers, honky tonk operators and wandering guitar pickers develops in the bigger towns south of the MasonDixon Line. Out of it come the urban blues, the Negro underworld ballads and the numerous songs of drinks and drugs. Out of the plantation bands maintained by wealthy slave owners for their own and their guests' entertainment there emerge the first emancipated Negro orchestras — string bands, brass bands and also the odd Basin Street Professor, St. Louis March King, Chicago party pianist as well as the coon shouters, black butt players and minstrel artists of the vaudeville stage. When the Negro march bands transferred vocal blues to brass instruments, jazz was born; when the Basin Street Professors transferred the guitar blues to the piano, boogie was born. Both were functional and paid well. Both formed integral parts of their particular social background: within this background they may well be considered as bona tide folk songs, played by the people for the people. They survived in this form until the slump changed the whole economic structure of the nation by concentrating the population's wealth in fewer hands. The innumerable small gin mills and honky tonks, both white and colored, shut down for lack of clients who could afford a drink while the slump profiteers asked for bigger and more exclusive hotels and night clubs where the riff-raff was kept out and the bands played sweet music under soft lights. To earn a living, musicians had to join these big bands and in the process of learning to read and play printed arrangements they lost the faculty of collective improvisation. When the slump receded and the oldtime jazz began to rear its ugly head again in the compromise bands of the nineteen thirties from Casa Loma to Goodman, it was already too late for jazz to survive. Arrangers and orchestrators were deeply entrenched in a financial network of sheet-music publishers and radio stations; everywhere spit and polish had replaced vigor and imagination; the old-timers could still improvise but there were too few of them to form bands together, and thus collective improvisation died out. Now the war with its attendant boorr has started another small-band vogue as it did in 1913, but there seems little hope that the old-timers will survive another post-war slump. Only collective improvisation as a big band practice on a paying basis can still save the day. This is the aim constantly advocated in this column. It offers the lasi chance of training a new generation tc carry on the jazz tradition. Ill There have been no answers to oui request for information on the missing links in the history of boogie — i.e., the connection between guitar blues and walking bass (Who was the first tc transfer the rolling guitar bass to the piano?); the connection between ragtime and party piano playing (How much ragtime did Ammons and Johnson really pick up from player piano rolls); the connection between the turpentine camps and the boogie tradition; the connection between railroad workers' train songs and the party pianists' train blues, etc. Will all musicians and collectors please write to us. if they have any oi these facts and data? IV All answers to our query on policy have confirmed us in our conviction that we should try to offset the slick-papei tradejournals' slick trade journalism by a declared policy of research work and musical analysis. Any comments on this question of policy are very welcome. Please write to Gullickson in Fairfax, Va., or to me in Ottawa, Canada. One comment I would like to add to last month's discussion of this policy question: In reply to R. H. Kendregan's attempt to put some humor into the Anthropologist Column, I said that I didn't "think any righteous jazz criticism could be amusing and informative at the same time. Since then I have read Mr. Richard O. Boyer's Ellington biography in the New Yorker of June 24, July 1 and July 7, and I'm reluctantly obliged to take my hat off to Mr. Boyer and eat it. He's done the job. Here is the best piece of descriptive writing on our music that I have read — and the most amusing. Get hold of back numbers if you missed the series of articles when it came out. It's an object lesson of what our wealthy contemporaries like DOWNBEAT and METRONOME could do with their money if they wanted to publish good, amusing and honest prose on their kind of jazz. . . . E. B. 44