Jazz and the Philosophy of Art

Lee B. Brown, David Goldblatt, Theodore Gracyk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138241367
• eBook ISBN: 9781315280592
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Co-authored by three prominent philosophers of art, Jazz and the Philosophy of Art is the first book in English to be exclusively devoted to philosophical issues in jazz. It covers such diverse topics as minstrelsy, bebop, Voodoo, social and tap dancing, parades, phonography,

musical forgeries, and jazz singing, as well as Goodman's allographic/autographic distinction, Adorno's critique of popular music, and what improvisation is and is not.

The book is organized into three parts. Drawing on innovative strategies adopted to address challenges that arise for the project of defining art, Part I shows how historical definitions of art provide a blueprint for a historical definition of jazz. Part II extends the book's commitment to social-historical contextualism by exploring distinctive ways that jazz has shaped, and been shaped by, American culture. It uses the lens of jazz vocals to provide perspective on racial issues previously unaddressed in the work. It then examines the broader premise that jazz was a socially progressive force in American popular culture. Part III concentrates on a topic that has entered into the arguments of each of the previous chapters: what is jazz improvisation? It outlines a pluralistic framework in which distinctive performance intentions distinguish distinctive kinds of jazz improvisation.

This book is a comprehensive and valuable resource for any reader interested in the intersections between jazz and philosophy.

PART I

How is Jazz Distinctive? Essence and Definition

1

Dancing, Dwelling, and Rhythmic Swing

How music works, or doesn’t work, is determined not just by what it is in isolation (if such a condition can ever exist) but in large part by what surrounds it, where you hear it and when you hear it.

– David Byrne, How Music Works

Who the hell wants to dance in Carnegie Hall?

– Leonard Feather

Philosophers tend to analyze music as a set of sounds, or an abstract recipe for directing those sounds, or the performance of those sounds, or recorded instances of performances. However, we want to say that, for all the philosophical value of each of those contributing theories, what is often missing is part of a culture in which those sounds are created and manifested. An aspect of culture may adhere so closely to the music itself that it is definitional – it so intimately identifies with the music that it would be a conceptual error to omit it from an account of its nature.¹

For jazz, one such socio-historical factor is dancing. Another is the physical locations, the buildings and other forums, the architecture of jazz – the where of the music. What we argue in this chapter, in the context of jazz, can be set against a purely sonic conception of music such as one taken by Roger Scruton, one of the more prominent contemporary aestheticians. Scruton says, “Music relies neither on linguistic order nor on physical context, but on organization that can be perceived in sound itself, without reference to physical context or to semantic conventions.”² In contrast, this chapter makes an inclusive case for understanding dancing to the music of jazz, and the places at or in which the dancing occurred, as an essential element of jazz during one long stretch of its history. Then there was a reinvention of the social practices surrounding jazz, and these relationships were severed. There is reason, therefore, to ask whether subsequent jazz is really a different art, with different aims, and so whether there is any definition or characterization of jazz that unites its different eras.³ In this opening chapter we review some pertinent facts from jazz history. Debates about the nature and value of jazz arise, in part, from factual disputes. Consequently, we are engaged in a descriptive project as well as a conceptual one.⁴ In this chapter and the next two, we examine the prospects for a definition that makes sense of the common assumption that jazz is still with us.

1. Dancing and the Essence of Jazz

The first reference to “jazz” in print describes it as dance music. According to Alyn Shipton, the San Francisco Bulletin in March 1913 called jazz “dance music full of vigor and ‘pep.’”⁵ We know usage can change quickly and, says Shipton, while ragtime and blues did not, jazz came to have scatological connotations and stayed disreputable as the music entered the twenties and the Jazz Age. In the middle years of the century, philosopher William Fontaine seems to have been the only African-American professor at an Ivy League college. Recalling his teen years in the 1920s in Chester, Pennsylvania, he says:

The word ‘jazz’ sounded everywhere. Shoeshine boys would greet a prospect with, ‘Hey! Git a jazz shine!’ Bosomy, young brown girls, in two’s and three’s, strolled the streets at sundown singing, ‘Um a jazz baby!’ Silk-shirted pimps and loafers lolling on the corners carnivorously eying the budding brown beauties answering, ‘Hi, sugar. Would you like to be my jazz baby?’⁶

Above all, jazz was associated with the decadence that went along with prohibition and speakeasies.⁷ As one early article asked, “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?” Evidently, it did, largely by setting the tone for “barbaric” and “immoral” dancing.⁸ As it spread through popular culture, the music came to mean different things to black and white America. But from its beginnings and through its raunchiest periods, jazz was linked to dance. Jazz respectability was, in part, a matter of severing this connection.

For a long stretch of its history, the popularity of jazz was intimately connected with social dancing for which much of the music was created, and with the places in which dancing happened. Although types of dances and kinds of places changed over time, ballrooms were paradigms of places to dance – public places like Roseland or the Savoy Ballroom, that were large enough to house hundreds of in-off-the-street patrons, who would dance to the music of big bands and jazz orchestras and with them scores of jazz vocalists. As a popular art, jazz provided “accessibility with minimum effort, virtually on first contact.”⁹ As it happens with many art histories, bifurcations within a single art form occur – sharp turns in the evolution of art. At some point jazz changed – its primary point of accessibility disappeared when the music became non-danceable for its audience and its venues became smaller clubs almost exclusively.¹⁰ Its audiences now came to listen to a music that had become increasingly self-conscious. Overall, the change – from large to small places, and from moving bodies to static ones – could be characterized as a shift in kind and in degree. As we explain over the course of this chapter, the shift in kind is from popular art to high art in the music of jazz. The shift in degree is from a high degree of bodily or somatic engagement to a relatively low somatic engagement, approximating the kind of sitting-stillness of a classical concert. Borrowing the words of Richard Shusterman, “an African[-derived] aesthetic of vigorously active and communally impassioned engagement” gradually gave way to a European-style “dispassionate judgmental remoteness.”¹¹ We mark this change as the emergence of bebop in the 1940s. We see it as the most significant historic and aesthetic revolution in jazz history. It arose from socio-cultural forces, but it was also driven by longstanding theoretical assumptions about the arts and the place of jazz within the arts. And it may well be, as several historians propose, that the end of jazz as danceable music, coming at a time when sales of recorded music exploded, opened the doors for rock and roll to fill the void for dancing in a young America.¹²

One way of dividing the diverse periods of the history of jazz is to use criteria that lie outside the music itself and yet are important, as we will argue, for understanding jazz and its stages of development.¹³ Jazz as music to dance to characterizes a good deal of jazz up until the 1940s and 1950s when the venues of jazz, its architecture, began to shift as well – not suddenly or everywhere at once – so that, eventually, jazz became a music, live and recorded, to listen to. Its central role as paralleling and guiding bodily movement was largely forgotten by its audience. There are two other important ways dancing and jazz are part of a single entity: in addition to dancers out for the evening, professionals were hired to dance as part of the entertainment for those set in place to watch them and then, in a more subtle sense, there is the dancing of the jazz musicians themselves as they play their music, their dancing, for some, literal. In this chapter, then, we widen the perspective in which jazz is understood in order to see it as a cultural phenomenon, part of a form of life that involved professionals and non-professionals alike. Any account of jazz that isolates sounds from bodies is seriously incomplete.

2. Dance Venues

Beginning with the 1920s there were a plethora of jazz clubs, cabarets and ballrooms, small and large, in which dancing took place. However, any telling of dancing to jazz would do well to focus on the Savoy Ballroom – the Harlem dance emporium that featured some of the best jazz bands in the country. Opening in March of 1926, the huge Savoy turned away 2000 potential customers on its first night, with Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra, his band once called “The Henderson Dance Orchestra,” making a guest appearance. Downtown, Roseland was whites-only, but the uptown Savoy was an integrated dance hall, initially the only one in New York City. The Savoy remained the place to be for jazz and dancing almost until it was closed in December 1958. The plaque where it stood begins: “Here stood the Savoy Ballroom, a hothouse for the development of jazz in the Swing Era.” But in its heyday it was called “The Home for Happy Feet,” placing the emphasis on dancing to the music. It was also the preeminent social hub in New York City for African-Americans for a night out, and these two phenomena are closely related. The Savoy’s reputation as the best place for music was overwhelmed by it being the best place for dancing, with the quality of the dancers themselves a large part of the draw. The Savoy was known for its amazing set of in-off-the-street dancers (amateurs, if you will) who created dances like the Lindy Hop (the steps named after Charles Lindbergh, who had just made the first solo airplane “hop” across the Atlantic in 1927). A partner dance, the Lindy spread all over America and endured for decades. A successor to the Charleston, the Lindy Hop – described by one chronicler as “a symmetrical frenzy” – is still regarded as an essential pattern for jazz social dancing.¹⁴ However, there were many other dances, such as the Shuffle Off to Buffalo. When she was fourteen and fifteen, Ella Fitzgerald was regularly taking the subway ten miles to visit the Savoy to learn the latest new dance steps. Back home in Yonkers, she earned money recreating those dances on street corners and in local clubs.¹⁵ Her rhythmic acuity as one of jazz’s greatest vocalists was unquestionably shaped by the dance culture of the Savoy.

The Savoy was remarkable for many reasons. It featured virtually every star of jazz in America, black and white, at one point or another. Even if its occupancy was largely African-American, it was a racially integrated forum during a time of segregated social life in the United States. It was managed by a black man, Charles Buchanan, but was owned by two white men, Moe Gale and Jay Faggen, the latter also the owner of the downtown Roseland, the other great ballroom for dancing to jazz in New York City. Unlike many smaller Harlem dance clubs, the Savoy was a “class” place – an enormous emporium with two bandstands and pink and mirrored walls, which boasted special nights for contests and prizes, including battles of the bands.

Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues contains several pages of black and white photographs from Harlem dance halls, one of which shows the street side, the outside of the Savoy Ballroom. The marquee advertises: “BREAKFAST DANCE XMAS EVE SUNDAY DEC 24 HAWKINS MACHITO & JIMMY RUSHING ORCHS.” The caption reads “A world-renowned stomping place on Lenox Avenue at 140^th Street, from 1926–59, where the music of the great dance orchestras was always at its best. …The ballroom floor was a block long with a double bandstand to accommodate the two orchestras that usually played alternating sets.”¹⁶ Other photos in Murray’s book offer a telling glimpse of what went on inside the Savoy. One shows a packed dance floor – entirely African-American – and what looks like slow dancing. Men and women are dressed to the nines and we see a uniformed orchestra on a slightly raised bandstand. The photos are stills, of course, but some suggest the swirling, swift movement of the dancers, their faces exhibiting the thrill of the ride. In the living presence of jazz orchestras, the best means of beating whatever may be downcast for any individual was by stomping the blues at the Savoy on a Saturday night.¹⁷

Soon after the Savoy opened in 1926, another Harlem jazz venue opened its doors. As social history, the contrast could not have been greater. Located at Lenox Avenue and 125th Street, for years the upscale Cotton Club featured virtually every star of the new “jazz” era. From 1927 to 1931, Duke Ellington’s eleven-piece orchestra was on stage, and radio broadcasts from the club gave Ellington a national audience. However, the club was a whites-only forum, with black musicians supporting carefully selected groups of young “Nubian” or “sepia” (African-American) showgirls dancing in a kind of “jungle” act for the white patrons. The set design and choreography was, not surprisingly, by whites.¹⁸ The club was run by gangsters and openly served alcohol during prohibition. The police were happy to cooperate by looking the other way. It was, for New York celebs, a social ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword – Lee Brown: A Recollection
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: How is Jazz Distinctive? Essence and Definition
• PART II: Jazz and American Culture
• PART III: Music Ontology
• Index