THE CASE AGAINST JAZZ

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 21, 16 April 1927, Page 17 (Supplement)

THE CASE AGAINST JAZZ

jTAZZ has two aspects. Musical people have mostly ceased to take It seriously as music. Whatever may be the case in America, in England the thing, regarded as music, is dead. We all found it amusing for a little while at first; it was like a new cocktail. But when the novelty of it had worn off, musical people became sick and tired of it. I doubt whether a single musician of any standing could now be found in my country to say a good word for it. As music the thing has simply become an infernal nuisance and an unmitigated bore. It is solely its popularity for dancing purposes that keeps it in the public eye and ear; it is still unequalled as a medium -which fair women may perspire in fib* arms of brave men. My “case against ja«z,” then (says an English critic) is purely and simply a musical case. It is as a musician that I object, for one thing, to the ordinary jazzing of the classics. Not that I would eVer object to a clever musical parodist exercising

his humour at the expense of any master. But to do this acceptably he has to be a master of himself; there is nothing more delicious than firstrate parody, but it takes a first-rate mind to do it. The jazzsmiths, however, speaking generally, are not clever enough to make their manipulations of the classics tolerable. They are not artists in the sense that the great literary parodists have been; they are merely hearty, grinning, chaw-bacons. The average jazzsmith, in this wouldbe humorous treatment of a 'lassie, is merely a street urchin who thinks he has been smart when he has sidled up to a poster when no one was looking and added a moustache to the upper lip of the beautiful lady who figures in it. The negro melody is bettered by Dvorak’s treatment of it; but the cautabile melouy of Chopin’s “Fantaisie Impromptu” is decidedly worsened by Harry Carroll’s treatment of it in “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.” He has simply made the poor tune commit, so

to speak, hari-kari on Chopin's doorstep. Let the jazzsmith, if he can, give a hew turn to the smile of Mona Lisa; but for Heaven’s sake don’t let him set the lady’s charming mouth moving mechanically to the slow conquest of a piece of chewing gum. But will jazz develop an art of its own that will be able to bear comparison with what we generally mean when we speak of “music”? I take leave to doubt this. There is not, and never can be, a specifically jazz technique of music, apart from orchestration. We might as well suppose there can be such a thing as Mohammedan mathematics, or Buddhist biology, or Peruvian psychology, as suppose that there can be, in the last resort, such a thing as jazz music as distinct from ordinary music. There is only one way of writing music on the large scale; you must have ideas, and you must know how to develop them logically. Now, in boih these respects the jazz composer is seriously hampered. If he writes too obviously In what we call the jazz style he will not get very far, for the ideas and the devices are too stereotyped. If, on the other hand, he moves very far away from these devices, he will not be recognised as a jazz composer. Tie a composer down to tnese standardised jazz tricks and he cannot say much in them that has not been said already; let him depart from the tricks, and his music will no longer be jazz. It is an instrument on which little men can play a few pleasant little tunes; but if a composer of any power were to try to play his tunes on it, it would soon break in his hands.