1927 and the Rise of Modern America

by Charles Shindo

  Starring Broadway star Al Jolson, The Jazz Singer not only revolutionized the industry by forcing studios to commit to the production of films with sound but also revived interest in the film industry, which had been on the wane for several years. Despite the fact that silent film art had reached its peak in the mid-1920s, movie attendance had started to decline, especially among those who could afford other forms of entertainment, such as live performances and home radio sets. To combat this decline, the large movie palaces increased the appeal of their screenings by adding live performances to the bill. Most large metropolitan theaters employed full orchestras and sometimes choirs to accompany the films, as well as using composers, arrangers, and extensive score libraries as resources. Silent films seldom had original scores composed for them by the studios; rather, they employed score sheets that gave theater composers and arrangers (and organists at theaters without orchestras) performance suggestions ranging from what moods to set (love, rage, sadness) to what musical sound effects to use (battles), and even suggestions of classical or popular songs to use. The most accomplished of the theater composers might have their scores adapted for general-release versions of films that had extended runs in New York and Los Angeles and that toured the larger theaters across the country. Road-show pictures, as these big-budget films were called, were treated more like Broadway plays than motion pictures. Most road shows toured for about a year before general release, but some, like The Big Parade (1925), toured for two years before its general release in 1927. In 1928 the over-two-and-a-half-hour road-show version of The King of Kings was cut to under two hours, and the score written by Hugo Riesenfeld for the Gaiety Theater was adapted and transferred to a synchronized soundtrack for the full release of the film, extending the run of the silent film into the era of sound. Many of the late silent films became synchronized sound films simply by transferring a musical score either to disk or film. The musicians employed at the movie palaces would also accompany live performances as well as offer musical selections ranging from popular vaudeville tunes to classical works. To attract audiences large enough to fill their theaters (from 2,000 to 6,000 seats), owners offered a variety of entertainments, with the motion picture being the headlining act.

  With the introduction of sound, speakers and sound equipment replaced live musicians, in part because films could now give audiences something they could not before, musical performances. Silent film had always had a problem with showing musicians and singers on film because the type of musical accompaniment varied widely from theater to theater. While major houses could reproduce almost any style of music, smaller theaters relied on a single organist or pianist, or had nothing at all. This meant that the need for diagetic music (music whose performance is being portrayed on the screen from musicians, a radio, or the like) could not always be met in a manner supportive of the story. Telling the story of The Jazz Singer would not have been possible in a silent film since the story is dependent on the way the songs are sung. Without the comparison between the sacredness of “Kol Nidre” sung on the Day of Atonement and the frivolity of “Blue Skies” sung by Jolson, the film could not musically express the major conflict in the story, between the Cantor Rabinowitz and his jazz-singing son, Jack Robin.

  Jolson plays Jackie Rabinowitz, son of the cantor and next in a long line of cantors. While his immigrant father expects him to follow the family line, Jackie only wants to sing jazz. When the father learns of his son’s inclination, he punishes Jackie, leading him to run away and seek his fortune as a vaudeville performer. In his struggle to make it as a jazz singer, Jackie (now Jack Robin) meets and falls in love with Mary Dale, a shiksa. By embracing jazz, as well as Mary, Jack has assimilated into American society, but at the cost of losing his traditions and religion. As Jack arrives back in New York on the verge of becoming a Broadway star, he visits his mother and sings her a couple of songs from his show, including “Blue Skies,” an optimistic song that belies the trouble ahead: “Blue skies smiling at me, nothing but blue skies do I see.” His father, hearing the music coming from his house, kicks Jack out and declares his son dead, but Jack is pulled back into the family when, on the eve of his big Broadway debut, his mother comes to the dress rehearsal to ask Jack to fill in as cantor for his ill father at the Day of Atonement services, which coincide with the opening. Jack is torn between his love of family and his devotion to his career, a career that his mother realizes is his calling once she hears him sing at the dress rehearsal. Yet Jack cannot completely reject his family and traditions, and, postponing his Broadway debut, he sings “Kol Nidre” on the Day of Atonement as his father listens from his bedroom across the street. His father then dies, content with his Jackie and the world. But Jackie does not stay with the synagogue; instead, the film ends with Jack Robin, a big star, singing “My Mammy” on Broadway with his overjoyed mother sitting in the front row.

  Unlike The King of Kings, The Jazz Singer treats religion not in a detached, reverential, historical setting but in a contemporary setting. The film aimed not to resolve the problems of modern life through religion, as DeMille had sought to do, but rather to address the problem of fitting a religious life into a modern industrial society. While in the end Jack chooses American success over religious tradition, he does not abandon religion altogether, and the film shows the impact his faith has on his life. Much of the difference between the two films has to do with the religions in question, Christianity and Judaism, but the main conflict in The Jazz Singer is not between Jewish traditions and Christian ones, but between Old World, family traditions and New World, American values of success and assimilation. Likewise, De-Mille sought to ensure that The King of Kings was not an indictment of Jews in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ but, rather, an indictment of Roman power. The film is more representative of anti-imperialist sentiment shaped by Great War experiences and American beliefs in democracy. “The difficult thing of course is to tell the story so as not to offend any religion or sect,” DeMille stated, “to attack certain usages of Ancient Rome, and show the crucifixion of Christ, His persecution, not by the Jewish people, but by a group of Roman politicians who saw that the ideals of Jesus, accepted by the people, would sweep away the power of Rome.”16 In both films, religion lends a necessary balance to modern life.17

  While the story of The Jazz Singer appealed to audiences conflicted about modern life, it would not have had the impact it did if people did not hear the voice of Al Jolson but instead heard a member of a choir or a solo pianist perform his songs. Part of the novelty of the film was not only its synchronized sound but the fact that people were able to hear a famous Broadway performer. Unlike earlier experiments with sound film, The Jazz Singer combined all the elements that a sound film could contain in a way no other medium could. A consistent musical performance by a popular performer presented along with a melodramatic story line that addressed the concerns of the audience made the film the huge success it became. Sound films increased the talent pool available to Hollywood with the inclusion of singers and musicians. The introduction of sound was good not only for sagging Hollywood receipts but also for the emerging genre of jazz, which The Jazz Singer exploited in its title, if not in the musical offerings. The title illustrates the broad definition given to jazz in the 1920s and the ability of the idea of jazz to represent the struggle between new and old. While jazz music in the 1920s spread throughout the country from its southern origins, most jazz on film revealed only traces of the innovative music. Authentic jazz could be heard to varying degrees in clubs, on records, and on the radio, but rarely in films of the 1920s.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald and others used the term “jazz,” and all it evoked, to represent the new and modern—as well as the superficial and decadent—but for many others jazz was not so simply defined. Some saw in the music a deep connection to an African American past, whether the recent past of slavery or the more distant past of Africa. Others saw jazz as a way to modernize and Americanize classical western music, much in the same way
that Harlem Renaissance writers and artists sought to modernize and Americanize literature and art through the use of African American folk idioms and primitivism. Jazz was simultaneously seen as a cultural achievement to be celebrated, an aberration to be denounced, a means of self- and/or group expression, or a commodity to be packaged and sold. For many, jazz was all these things, and regardless of definition or intention, jazz permeated American culture in the 1920s, on the radio and stage, in ballrooms and nightclubs, in films and in literature. Historian Kathy Ogren argues that “for many Americans, to argue about jazz was to argue about the nature of change itself.”18 Dealing with jazz, in many respects, meant not only dealing with race but also dealing with the very ambiguity of modern American life.

  The Jazz Singer’s significance in the history of the motion picture industry, as well as its content, illustrates the way Hollywood entertainment sought to deal with issues of cultural modernization, but the film is also significant in its use of jazz and white perceptions of African American culture. While not what most jazz musicians of the day would have considered jazz music, the songs used in The Jazz Singer represented white interpretations of African American music, mainly inspired by the minstrel show. Even though the film does not promote the actual music of jazz musicians, it does promote the idea of jazz, a musical form based on the experiences of slaves and unique to the United States. Jack Robin does not become an American just by changing his name and shedding his Jewish heritage. He becomes an American by singing American music and through his realization that jazz music expresses the suffering of his people and his uniquely American situation. In relating his own experience to the experience of African Americans through the use of blackface performance, Jack Robin not only sheds his Jewish identity but also, as Michael Rogin argues, disempowers both Jews and African Americans. More than assimilation, the film promotes the silencing and marginalization of authentic minority voices for homogenized “American” ones.19

  The film used the term “jazz” to represent modern America. For the Cantor Rabinowitz, a jazz singer and his music were the furthest thing from his Jewish religion and Old World tradition, not only because of its sound but also because of its commercialization. Indeed, the film makes the case that the intent and sound of jazz music is similar to religious music when Yudelson comments that Jack sings his Broadway song “with the cry in the voice, just like in the temple,”20 and later, when Jack performs “Kol Nidre” at the temple, the Broadway producer remarks, “a jazz singer—singing to his God.”21 The Jazz Singer illustrates the broad definition of jazz familiar to American audiences, one that is only partially about the music. This expansive definition allows for the inclusion of a wide array of musicians within the world of jazz and eliminates the distinction between jazz as a black form of music and the appropriation of it by white musicians. For many Americans, both black and white musicians performed jazz music, and jazz distinguished more the difference between modernity and tradition, or the difference between artistic and commercial, than the difference between black and white. While this distinction brought respectability to jazz as a commercial product, it did not bring about an increase in respect for African American culture.

  jazz and african american culture

  Jazz began in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, the result of that city’s unique racial mix of ethnic whites, African Americans, and Creoles, but it did not gain a national following since New Orleans at the turn of the century did not have the means to disseminate the music beyond live performances. What had started as a black folk music drawing on spirituals and blues had become, with the introduction of ragtime syncopation and European musical instruments such as those in a brass band, a new musical style, uniquely American. By 1927, “jazz,” as a popular term, was about ten years old. In 1917, the white New Orleanians making up the Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded the first jazz records in New York and became a phenomenon, mostly among white college students. The year 1917 also marked the entrance of the United States into the Great War and the attendant migration of rural southerners, mainly black, to the urban industrial centers of the North. The new commercial possibilities of jazz music, along with the dispersion of jazz musicians from New Orleans to Chicago, New York, and elsewhere, created a jazz craze throughout the 1920s.22 Jazz in 1927 was still considered not mainstream music but, rather, a music of the younger generation that represented modernity in a home-grown musical form. Chicago-style jazz retained the closest ties to New Orleans–style jazz, with most major Chicago musicians being transplanted New Orleanians playing mainly in small bands for a midwestern regional audience. New York jazz favored a more mainstream version of the music played in larger bands and orchestras and catered to a more national audience of record buyers and radio listeners. Both styles of jazz represented the modern age to its listeners, since they took advantage of the latest technology and attracted a younger, less traditionally minded audience. “Jazz” as an idea reflected all that was new in the culture, as evidenced by its rhetorical, though not musical, use in The Jazz Singer.

  New Orleans native Louis Armstrong “personified the jazz scene in Chicago” during the 1920s. Armstrong had been schooled in the New Orleans style by King Oliver while he was playing with Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, and he “combined New Orleans rhythm with Chicago elegance and invented a new approach to jazz.”23 According to one biographer, Armstrong “was in the process of developing the vocabulary of modern jazz,”24 combining many different musical experiences into his playing and writing. Armstrong was influenced not only by his New Orleans musical upbringing but also by his exposure to classical and other popular music through his second wife, Lil Hardin, and by a year playing in New York with the dance-oriented Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. These influences created in Armstrong a style of playing unlike any other, with a definite focus on Armstrong as soloist and star. “Hot” jazz, as played in New Orleans and Chicago, featured multiple soloists. The democratic nature of solo breaks and improvisation prevented any one musician in a group from dominating completely since the character of the music came primarily from the interplay among the group’s members. New York–style jazz, on the other hand, favored arranged orchestrations that centered attention on the band-leader (or conductor) rather than on soloists, who were allowed limited opportunity for improvisation. Armstrong excelled in both settings and by 1927 was playing regularly in a small “hot” band at the Sunset Café and in a large orchestra (first the Erskine Tate Orchestra at the Vendome Theater, then with Clarence Jones’s Orchestra at the Metropolitan Theater), not to mention in recording gigs as sideman to such blues singers as Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, and Ma Rainey.

  Armstrong’s sense of experimentation and style appear most prominently in recordings he made from 1925 to 1928 under various names (Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives, Louis Armstrong and His Hot Fives, and Louis Armstrong and His Hot Sevens) with banjo player Johnny St. Cyr, saxophonist Johnny Dodds, trombonist Kid Ory (all New Orleanians), and pianist Lil Hardin Armstrong, among others. While these recordings were popular among “hot” jazz enthusiasts and black urban populations, they were not at the time seen as the watershed recordings they are today considered. These recordings, made for Okeh Records, fit into Okeh’s agenda of supplying records of New Orleans–style jazz music for a black population recently relocated from the South. As such, they targeted a specific audience and were not meant for mainstream (mainly white) audiences. Armstrong’s Stompers, playing at the Sunset Café, likewise played for primarily black audiences, with a sprinkling of white musicians coming around to listen in, while his orchestra work reached the widest audience playing between, and even during, silent films. Even though Armstrong’s repertoire included everything from classical pieces to popular songs, he is best remembered for his innovations in soloing with his “hot” jazz groups. Improvisation was Armstrong’s strong suit, as it was for most New Orleans musicians who were “ear” players rather than more traditionally trained “sight” players, who
could read music. One reason Armstrong left Fletcher Henderson’s very successful dance orchestra in New York was the lack of improvisation and experimentation allotted to Armstrong, or to anyone else in the orchestra. Henderson’s jazz was “light, polite music for dancing and socializing . . . and not intended as a means of self-expression.”25