Fascinating Rhythm

Reading Jazz in American Writing

David Yaffe

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780691123578
• eBook ISBN: 9781400826803
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

How have American writers written about jazz, and how has jazz influenced American literature? In Fascinating Rhythm, David Yaffe explores the relationship and interplay between jazz and literature, looking at jazz musicians and the themes literature has garnered from them by appropriating the style, tones, and innovations of jazz, and demonstrating that the poetics of jazz has both been assimilated into, and deeply affected, the development of twentieth-century American literature.


Yaffe explores how Jewish novelists such as Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, and Philip Roth engaged issues of racial, ethnic, and American authenticity by way of jazz; how Ralph Ellison's descriptions of Louis Armstrong led to a "neoconservative" movement in contemporary jazz; how poets such as Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, and Frank O'Hara were variously inspired by the music; and how memoirs by Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, and Miles Davis both reinforced and redeemed the red light origins of jazz. The book confronts the current jazz discourse and shows how poets and novelists can be placed in it--often with problematic results. Fascinating Rhythm stops to listen for the music, demonstrating how jazz continues to speak for the American writer.

You ain’t heard nothing yet!

—AL JOLSON, The Jazz Singer, 1920

How do we know who copied what?

—LOUIS ARMSTRONG, 1960

1

WHITE NEGROES AND NATIVE SONS

BLACKS AND JEWS IN WORDS AND MUSIC

Literature has not completely told the story of relations between African Americans and Jews in America. Irving Howe famously thought he could tell Ralph Ellison how to be black, and Saul Bellow contributed a footnote to the culture wars by asking a newspaper interviewer where he could find the Zulu Tolstoy. ¹ Ellison and Richard Wright, meanwhile, had their own stories to get out, relegating their complex relations with Jewish communists in the 1930s to the sidelines, and Langston Hughes did not exactly achieve a Tikkun with a 1926 volume called Fine Clothes to the Jew. Seventy years later, Amiri Baraka refused to step down from his post as Poet Laureate of New Jersey for implying, in his poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” that Israeli forces were somehow complicit in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; knowing “the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed” beforehand and warning “4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers / To stay home that day. ”²

It is unfortunate that Baraka is now better known as the conspiracy theorist who wrote these lines than he is as the music critic who called for “standards of judgment and aesthetic standards that depend on our native knowledge and understanding of the underlying philosophies and local cultural references that produced blues and jazz in order to produce valid critical writing and commentary about it. ”³ Such a mode would have to acknowledge collaboration as much as it castigates exploitation. “I got the extermination blues, jewboys,” Jones wrote in 1965. “I got the hitler syndrome figured. ” The Jones of 1963 was arguing that to understand jazz one had to understand the culture it came from. Baraka sang his “extermination blues” while casting off his Jewish wife, Hettie Jones, as a “fat jew girl,” and while he could cut himself loose from Jews in his life—and, with such writings, offend as many Jewish readers as possible—the cultural background of the music he loved could not be separated into discrete ethnic strands so easily. Novels, poems, and hostile letters to the editor are usually written in isolation. Musicals, songs, and bop lines are usually crafted in collaboration. The literary exchanges between blacks and Jews often reinforced their differences: Irving Howe versus Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer versus James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka versus the states of Israel and New Jersey. Black-Jewish musical exchanges—from Thelonious Monk’s troping of Berlin’s “Blue Skies” and Gershwin’s “I’ve Got Rhythm,” to the call and response of Artie Shaw’s clarinet and Roy Eldridge’s trumpet—often demonstrate an aesthetic symbiosis.

If anyone could have been in a position to understand how crucial the black-Jewish collaboration was for jazz, it would have been the author of “Jazz and the White Critic” (before he became the author of “Somebody Blew Up America”), and if one were to follow the former LeRoi Jones’s assertion in 1963 that a true understanding of jazz required an examination of the “local cultural references” of the music, casting off Jews from the narrative is not only bad politics, it is bad scholarship. To sever the ties between blacks and Jews is to miss the collaboration that transformed George Gershwin’s “I’ve Got Rhythm” from a 1930showcase for Ethel Merman to the “rhythm changes” used as a basis for Duke Ellington’s “Cottontail,” Charlie Christian’s “Seven Come Eleven,” Charlie Parker’s “Salt Peanuts,” Thelonious Monk’s “Rhythm-a-Ning,” and much more. Gershwin’s 16-2-5 chord structure served as a guiding theme for the birth of bebop, and even if he was a Jew who was overt in his indebtedness to black music, the exchange worked both ways. Dizzy Gillespie’s Minton’s sessions would often start with playing the chords to “I’ve Got Rhythm”—known as “Rhythm” changes—and survival on the bandstand depended on adapting those changes to the heat and structural innovations of the moment. To this day, calling for “Rhythm” changes is a universally understood directive on the bandstand; it is a common language of bop, and while Gershwin came up with his chord sequence borrowing from the swing and stride he heard from black musicians in Harlem, the beboppers returned the favor. Many “Rhythm” changes were flying around on 52nd Street, and listening to Parker and Gillespie trade choruses on Gershwin’s tune did not mean that their musical dialogue should have given way to political complacency—that at the dawn of the civil rights era it was not also necessary to, as Ira Gershwin’s lyrics put it, ask for anything more. But because blacks lived in segregated America, the music was an avenue for a genuine collaboration with Jews that was documented in records but largely unacknowledged by the literati.

Indeed, the least understood yet most thoroughly developed dialectic between blacks and Jews was achieved not through literature but music, where song provided a haven for two marginalized ethnic groups before integration became the law of the land. By the time Jewish immigrants first arrived in the United States around the turn of the century, African Americans, though a despised and segregated minority, provided the most appealingidentity to trope. As Eileen Southern’s work has shown, African Americans were a central force in this country’s music as early as 1790. ⁴ By 1927, music was decidedly the dominant path to cultural assimilation—certainly for Eastern European Jews—as the hugely successful film The Jazz Singer famously demonstrates, even before Al Jolson gets blacked up for the film’s “Mammy” finale. ⁵ It is impossible to unravel the ethnic DNA of American music without examining the intertwining paths from ghetto to ghetto. Louis Armstrong got his first trumpet from the Karnofsky family, Jews who hired him to deliver coal to the whores of Storyville, his first joint from Mezz Mezzrow, a mediocre Jewish clarinet player, pledged allegiance to Joe Glaser, a Jewish gangster manager, and wore a star of David around his neck for most of his life. (So, by the way, did Elvis Presley, who, according to the website www. schmelvis. com, had a Jewish great-grandmother. ) Irving Mills helped Duke Ellington negotiate New York show business and was an early champion of his talent, pressuring record companies to let him write his first extended pieces. Charlie Parker shared bop lines (and a heroin habit) with the Jewish trumpeter Red Rodney and died in the arms of the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, a Jewish patroness. Benny Goodman led Billie Holiday’s first recording session, and saxophonist Stan Getz, a disciple of Lester Young, liked to say that, for a Bronx Jew, he swung pretty hard. The stories of Armstrong, Ellington, and Parker—arguably the central figures of American music—would be incomplete without acknowledging these Jewish alliances. George Gershwin, Benny Goodman, and Stan Getz were New York Jewish intellectuals who learned to read in a way that Howe, Alfred Kazin, Susan Sontag, and Lionel Trilling could not. They absorbed the language of black artists and transfigured the American vernacular forever.

Twenty years earlier, Benny Goodman, the Jewish clarinetist from Chicago’s South Side, initially resisted including black musicians in his touring band, but, at the prodding of producer John Hammond, made history by going into the studio with a band that included Lionel Hampton on vibes, Billie Holiday on vocals, Charlie Christian on guitar, and Teddy Wilson on piano. Goodman did not integrate his band to be a civil rights activist. He nevertheless made history with that multiethnic recording, and did so because, fixated on music and little else, Holiday, Hampton, Christian, and Wilson were simply the best collaborators he could find. When Goodman first played with Wilson in 1935, he recalled, “Teddy and I began to play as though we were thinking with the same brain. ” Stan Getz, alluding to Charlie Parker’s famous statement about Dizzy Gillespie, similarly described the pianist Kenny Barron as “the other half of my heart. ” Blacks and Jews have thought and felt together in the world of music, but this fact has not been recorded in literature until recently: Richard Powers’s novel The Time of Our Singing follows musical prodigies that are neither black nor Jewish, but both, and the outside world has trouble with this proposition.

But when competing versions of jazz appeared in the works of J. D. Salinger,Norman Mailer, and James Baldwin, the story was often similar. For Salinger jazz offered an alternative to bourgeois ennui, for Mailer, an orgasmic release from his existential dread, and for Baldwin, an underground, transgressive alternative to a somber algebra teacher. This is a far cry from the interethnic ideal exemplified in the Goodman-Wilson and Getz-Barron collaborations. Beyond the appropriation and transgression, jazz has offered a mode of expression that has brought blacks and Jews together in ways that the literature has largely kept separate, but even when literature visits jazz as a subject, African Americans and Jews are often relegated to limited roles. Max Roach has said that records are the textbooks of jazz, and when it comes to black-Jewish relations in America, records are much better textbooks than conventional literary writing. The recent historical fiction of Richard Powers may be revising that story, but it remains a work in progress. ⁶ Jazz inspired the prose of the Jewish writers J. D. Salinger and Norman Mailer, and a James Baldwin short story answered back. The music they were writing about was making a different kind of call and response than the one they heard, an ethnic hybrid that was stranger than fiction.

HOLDEN CAULFIELD’S BLUES

“A lot of jazz is outright Fraud. Charming, even richly evocative fraud on occasion. But don’t kid yourself that these jazz musicians are in possession of some wonderful and otherworldly power beyond anything you and I can comprehend. ” This invective against jazz comes from J. D. Salinger, according to Joyce Maynard’s memoir about her 1972 affair with the author. Salinger, who was said to enjoy listening to Blossom Dearie, Glenn Miller, and the Andrews Sisters, dismissed jazz musicians as merely “serving up a meal of old chestnuts from some other set they’ve played some other night, in front of some adoring audience of marvelous, thrillingly cool fans. ” Salinger’s complaint, it seems, was that jazz improvisation was essentially scripted, disingenuous, warmed over, or, to use the term favored by The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caufield, “phony. ”

The Salinger of 1972 apparently knew the drill of a jazz solo, and he found the spontaneity predictable. In his disappointment that jazz is like any other art, with its own structures, styles, and genres, Salinger echoes Adorno’s notorious dismissal of jazz improvisations as “mere frills. Any precocious American teenager knows that the routine today scarcely leaves any room for improvisation, and that what appears as spontaneity is in fact carefully planned out in advance with machinelike precision. ” Adorno concludes that jazz is the “false liquidization of art. ”⁷ In his stolen moment with Joyce Maynard, Salinger made a point similar to the Frankfurt School philosopher, yearning for an authentic expression that would somehow be spared the condemnation of phoniness Salinger applied to English teachers, history lessons, and prep school kids. When Phoebe Caufield accuses her brother, Holden, of complete misanthropy—“You don’t like anything that’s happening,” she tells him—she is nearly right, but he does spare a few things from his line of attack. In addition to Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, and the image of his sleeping sister, Holden singles out a record by the fictitious African American singer Estelle Fletcher called “Little Shirley Beans. ”

With this record, Salinger did not write about the white jazz musicians for whom he claimed preference. Instead, the voice of an African American singer and her legend serves as a contrast to the world of privilege he held up for contempt in a best-selling novel. The black jazz musicians of Salinger’s fiction, like Phoebe Caulfield and the precocious Glass children, are marginal figures who are both valorized and infantalized. Salinger’s novel has been obsessively scrutinized, but his peculiar relationship to jazz has not. ⁸ The music may have played a seemingly marginal role in Salinger’s already slim output, but it was a crucial fetish object for Holden Caulfield—and apparently for Salinger, as well. The Catcher in the Rye’s title refers to both a misreading of—or, indeed, an improvisation upon—a Burns ballad and a fantasy about saving children. Salinger’s jazz fantasies arise out of his dissatisfaction with traditional language but lead him to a sentimental paternalism that recalls Josephine Baker’s famous observation that “the white imagination sure is something when it comes to blacks. ”

Salinger’s musings on jazz are significant not because he was in any way an authority on the subject, but rather because The Catcher in the Rye, which has sold over sixty million copies since its publication in July 1951, has been a widely influential account of what was missing from the life of a white, privileged American teenager during the greatest period of economic prosperity the United States would ever know. The music of a historically despised minority would somehow fill such a gap for many of the first teenagers who read The Catcher in the Rye in the 1950s. Salinger, who was raised Jewish (his mother, it turned out, was passing to appease her chosen in-laws), had the same contempt for the prep school WASPs he encountered at Valley Forge, a military prep school, that Holden Caulfield had for the WASPs he encountered at Pencey. Like Holden, Salinger was a dropout, and both were interested in the not-yet-codified discourse of jazz. Salinger mentions jazz only briefly in The Catcher in the Rye, but explores it at length in the never anthologized story “Blue Melody” about a black singer named Lida Louise—a thinly veiled approximation of Bessie Smith, or at least her legend. Although there are no openly Jewish characters in this story, it is set against the backdrop of World War II and implies a correlation between damaged black and Jewish bodies. The action of the story turns on Smith’s mystique and the myths surrounding her death as told to a soldier on the German battlefront. As he faces death at the hands of the Nazis, the narrator finds in her story the authenticity that eludes Holden Caulfield.

In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden spends more time on things he considers to be “outright fraud” than things he considers to be authentic, and this, of course, is part of the book’s perennial contrarian appeal. Since Holden has flunked every subject at Pencey but English and managed to alienate himself from all of his peers, it is not surprising that he holds most people, artifacts,and modes of communication—from the history of the Egyptians to Laurence Olivier’s performance in Hamlet—in contempt for one reason or another. Holden searches for underground obsessions, and Salinger is not necessarily subtle with his imagery when he has his hero repeatedly badger cab drivers about the fate of the ducks when the Central Park pond freezes. But it is exactly such a mysterious underworld that fascinates Holden. A record by an African American singer named Estelle Fletcher also provides Holden with access to such a secret underground. Assuming the connoisseurship of the collector, Holden is proud of acquiring something outside of the mainstream:

There was this record I wanted to get for Phoebe, called “Little Shirley Beans. ” It wa...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. WHITE NEGROES AND NATIVE SONS
• 2. LISTENING TO ELLISON
• 3. STOMPING THE MUSE
• 4. LOVE FOR SALE
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY