The record changer (Jan-Feb 1945)

sponsibility for every single one of their statements rests on them alone. Yet the point remains that the average intelligence of the popular magazines' readership limits the amount of information on the more complex and more subtle characteristics that can be put across in their column. All that remains to be done is to support the few remaining jazzmen by sponsoring jam sessions, by supporting the clubs and hotels which employ them, by writing to the radio networks and the recording companies which can give them a chance. II From Art Feher: 1. In what tradition is rooted the contrapuntal (as opposed to harmonic) manner of jazz? 2. In response to what change of conditions did solos assume prominence in Oliver's Vocation recordings as against his Okehs and Gennets? 3. To what extent do you think white American dance musicians have assimilated Negro instrumental style? 4. In what direction is the trend of this assimilation ? Answers: 1. Jazz is a contrapuntal tradition by mere dint of the fact that the first jazz musicians could not read music. (I've gone into the African roots of heterophony in the Anthropologist Column and T don't want to repeat myself here.) Take any bunch of talented folk musicians, let one of them raise a tune unknown by the others and they'll chime in with what the Greeks called heterophony and what we call counterpoint after it has obtained a certain degree of development. Look at our own occidental music and you'll see the same development from improvised choral counterpoint on any type of ecclesiastical and lay tune to written counterpoint for voice (Palestrina, Vittoria), and on to the instrumental counterpoint of the Frescobaldis. It's nothing peculiar to jazz. It's a certain stage of development. Where that stage occurs in American Negro music, we call it jazz. When that stage is replaced by harmonic development, we call it swing. 2. Solos arise when the musician becomes more self-conscious and the composer becomes more autonomous. The musician then feels that he should stand out from the band and the composer feels that his tune should stand out from the interweaving pattern of instruments. This is the natural process of emancipation. It occurs equally in the history of "classical" music. 3. White musicians have assimilated Negro style to the extent that they have shared the milieu which gave rise to the idiom, i. e., New Orleans, the French Quarter, the lumber camps, the small joints where the blues were sung by itinerant folk singers, Chicago in the rent party days and the early Negro jazz period — and to the extent that they stayed free of the big bands and the block-scored arrangements played by them. Count the number of the really good white jazzmen, check their biographies and you'll see what I mean. 4. I can see no trend in white jazz which isn't either epigonic or hybrid. Let me point out, though, that I can't see the whole development as a racial thing at all. In fact I resent the whole racial attitude. Negroes gave the initial impetus to jazz, but after a while the impetus became AMERICAN rather than African — and America meant white and colored folks in their social and musical interchange. The reason for the great inferiority of white jazz is not racial, nor is it caused by any lack of talent ; it's entirely the sort of life which gave rise to jazz and which was shared by Negroes to a much greater extent than by whites. Remember, it was low life, and white people always had a better chance to get out of the depths. The moment they managed to become "civilized," they felt ashamed of their past and of jazz to the extent that it represented that past. They ceased to play jazz. That's all. 11