Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Van Vechten’s was a stray voice, however. Most whites believed that ‘the blues’ was merely a dance step, one of the bewildering array of movements on display in dance halls and ballrooms. For it was there that people first encountered the new sounds, translated into mainstream entertainment by one of the hundreds of dance bands who would dominate the music industry for the next fifteen years.

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  fn1 The ODJB’s trombonist, ‘Daddy’ Edwards, recalled that the band’s records would have been even more explosive had the primitive recording techniques of the day been equal to the sonic punch of Tony Spargo’s bass and snare drums.

  fn2 She died in a 1936 car accident, but not – contrary to popular legend – because the ambulance attending her refused to carry her to a white hospital.

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  THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AND physical impact of the First World War had been so crushing, especially upon the nations of Europe, that the mania for incessant dancing and the blaring of jazz horns was assumed to be an inescapable consequence. Would it die down? Would the etiquette of the pre-war era return, with its sedate tea dances free of syncopation and musical discords? ‘The War shattered many of our illusions3 and brought us nearer to earthy things’, the author Stanley Nelson wrote in 1934. ‘That is why the artificiality of the Victorians in their dance music was superseded by a dance music which was unashamedly proud of showing its crude emotional stress.’

  The music of that proud, crude impulse was always – when it was not being demeaned with blatantly racist epithets – called ‘jazz’. Not without confusion, however: Melody Maker reviewer Edgar Jackson, who would become one of Britain’s most ardent supporters of ‘hot’ jazz, initially demanded that no one should confuse the artistry of white jazz with its barbaric black equivalent. This cultural superiority came easily in a world where (in Britain) black people were rarely seen and (in America) an entire system of discrimination was ranged against them.

  These niceties of distinction were lost on the people who were dancing. ‘Jazz’ described any music to which young people danced and socialised, and which aroused disquiet amongst their elders. It was recognised not by its degree of syncopation or improvisation, but by its tempo, its percussive clamour and strident use of horns and clarinets. One instrument in particular, previously scorned by classical musicians, came to epitomise jazz. As if starring in a West End farce, a London High Court judge uttered the question of the moment: ‘What is a saxophone4?’ In 1927, a club on Merseyside was granted a dancing licence on the strict understanding that saxophones would not be used, for fear of upsetting the neighbours.

  There were occasional distractions from trial by saxophone. While young Europeans were being slaughtered on the battlefields of Verdun and the Somme in 1916, their American counterparts were serenading their sweethearts with an instrument, and a sound, that emanated from Hawaii. It took three years for the ukulele to cross the Atlantic, where it was greeted as ‘the antithesis of jazz5’, boasting ‘the soft seductiveness and peacefulness of the Pacific isle whence it comes’. It was accompanied by the ‘hula dance’, ideally performed (by Hawaiian women only, of course) in a grass skirt with enticingly bare limbs. When a ukulele band reached London’s Savoy hotel, a porter remarked: ‘That’s music.6 That dashed jazz isn’t.’

  War ensured that Britain and the Continent were late to experience the latest novelties from America. James Reese Europe, musical director for the dancing Castles, led the seventy-piece 369th Infantry Band (‘the Hellraisers’) to France in early 1918, raising morale among troops and locals alike with their jazz-inflected anthems. (Europe himself was murdered by one of his percussionists the following year, setting the bar high for future intra-band squabbles.) Records by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band had made their way to Britain by 1918, inspiring the first home-grown jazz record: Murray Pilcer’s ‘I’m All Bound Round with the Mason–Dixon Line’, which resembled an explosion in a musical instrument store.

  Britain was able to judge the ODJB’s merits at first hand in spring 1919, when the band joined the cast of the Hippodrome revue, Joy Bells. Their run lasted just one night, after which star comedian George Robey issued a ‘them or me’ ultimatum. They transferred to the Palladium, where the audience seemed confused as to whether the ODJB were a comic turn, albeit a deafening one: Britain had heard nothing so raucous as their three-horn front line. ‘This is the most discordant7 and uninteresting entertainment I have ever seen at the Palladium’, a reviewer lamented. ‘The resident orchestra fast asleep could amuse me more. These jazz bandsmen played like a swarm of bees who had lost their hive and found a home at the Palladium. I can see clearly that if I can rattle on any old tin, my future is made.’

  The ODJB were followed by the mostly black Southern Syncopated Orchestra, a thirty-piece unit which performed a mixture of classical themes, spirituals and what we would now recognise as jazz. Among their number was the first of the great jazz instrumentalists to perform in Europe: clarinettist Sidney Bechet, whose playing was described as ‘astonishing’ and ‘extraordinary8’. The Daily Express acclaimed the band as ‘Magicians9’ offering ‘High-Art Ragtime’, before letting forth with an equally astonishing display of racial stereotyping: ‘They are coffee-coloured, with glittering teeth, gollywog eyes on swivels, close-cropped hair, and heads on universal sockets, which will turn any way.’ Both bands proved so alarming and abrasive to many listeners that the press mounted a concerted campaign to declare that jazz was on the wane, hopelessly old-fashioned, and probably dead. Such declarations were repeated at almost monthly intervals, with no noticeable result, until jazz became culturally acceptable. The pattern would be repeated for the rest of the century: new music was not to be trusted, was probably immoral, and was surely about to be replaced by something altogether more sedate.

  Race, sex, drink and drugs certainly comprised a poisonous cocktail. In October 1916, police raided Ciro’s Club behind London’s National Gallery, having been alerted that liquor was being sold illegally (on a Sunday night, no less). They discovered 250 patrons, around seventy of whom were ‘dancing to the ragtime music10 of a nigger band’. Chief Inspector Glass was not an aficionado of ragtime: ‘It was rather rough. It was not classical. The musicians evidently struck the notes of their own accord.’ Such spontaneous music must surely be immoral. The press speculated wildly about the ‘eminent persons’ who were shepherded away from the scene to avoid arrest, the ubiquitous Prince of Wales being a likely suspect.

  Soon, however, London was inundated with dance orchestras and gyrating young aristocrats. The most prestigious venue was the Savoy hotel in the Strand. In 1920, its management recruited the Belgian-born manager of Rector’s Club, in Tottenham Court Road, to assemble suitably high-class entertainment. Already ensconced were the Savoy Quartet (a banjo band), to which W. F. De Mornys added a Hawaiian orchestra. This experiment faltered after the leader of the Hawaiians called the resident drummer ‘a damn nigger11’, to which the abused percussionist replied: ‘Mr De Mornys, isn’t he blacker than I am?’ In their stead, De Mornys formed a syncopated combo, the Savoy Havana Band, and added a second, more mellifluous ensemble, the Savoy Orpheans, explaining: ‘I am certain that although12 the British public likes the rhythm, they want to hear the melody and dislike the music too swinging – they want melody and quality of tone.’ His original line-up was a mixture of British and American musicians, ‘and some of the Yanks had their own ideas about jazz. When they got too “hot” for the Savoy, I sent them over to Claridge’s, where they soon had to quieten down. The restaurant manager there went berserk if they played a note of jazz.’

  As bandleader Ted Heath recalled, ‘Jazz was a novelty13, and people wanted to dance and forget the horrors of the First World War. Consequently, any good musician who had a feeling and a flair for playing the new syncopated dance music found himself in a lucrative line of business. Actually, such musicians were in short supply. The music was too new, too strange and somewhat alien to
the British temperament.’ There was, too, a premium placed upon the involvement of visiting Americans, whose playing was believed to be more authentic than that of their home-grown equivalents.

  While London’s hotels resounded to the subdued tones of American jazz, the tango and the foxtrot had followed a generation of rich young Americans to France. The beaches of Trouville and the casinos of Deauville reverberated to the rhythm of jazz dancing in the summer of 1920, and the wave swept down to the Riviera, inaugurating the decadent, hedonistic culture portrayed in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, Tender Is the Night.fn1 Fitzgerald was responsible for coining the phrase ‘the Jazz Age’, and widely acclaimed as its exemplar, despite his own ambivalent relationship with both the hedonism and its soundtrack. Not that the Jazz Age required a promoter: its momentum was self-generating, stoked by the relief that war was over and its shadow dispelled for generations to come.

  In the final weeks of the war, the breakneck rhythm of the ODJB’s ‘Tiger Rag’ presaged the hyperactivity to follow. Dozens of outfits followed in their wake. Variety was provided by the hint of beguiling scents from distant lands, via discs such as ‘Arabian Nights’ by the Waldorf-Astoria Dance Orchestra, with its hypnotic mock-Turkish melody; and the multimillion-selling ‘Dardanella’ (alias ‘Turkish Tom Toms’) by Ben Selvin’s Band, its repeated themes from xylophone and banjo anticipating the serial music of half a century hence. The latter’s success in January 1920 spawned copycat tunes entitled ‘Afghanistan’ and ‘Alexandria’.

  The entire order of American popular music was in flux. With few exceptions, the era of the ballad singer, unchanged since Victorian days, was over. Ragtime had been subsumed into jazz, and vaudeville stars, unless they were frightfully amusing, had to incorporate dance rhythms or the fashionable ‘blues’ feel to avoid sounding disastrously ‘before-the-war’. With ‘I’ll Say She Does’ and then ‘Swanee’ (by the young George Gershwin), Al Jolson hurled himself at the new order with such elan that rejection was impossible. He was the ultimate song stylist, stamping his personality on everything he recorded, his exaggerated vocal delivery the source of his charm. Effervescence of a similar order came from bandleader Ted Lewis, who fancied himself the true father of jazz (despite having been sacked from his first orchestra because his clarinet playing was so amateurish), but whose forte was disorderly dance tunes such as ‘When My Baby Smiles at Me’. This was not jazz by any scholarly measurement, but its entertainment value was undeniable.

  The first stars of the dance-band years were the Art Hickman Orchestra, renowned for their inability to read music (which seemed to boost their jazz credentials), and their reputation for infectious rowdiness. ‘The first note plunges you14 into an hilarious abandon from which there is no rescue ’til the music stops’, their record company declared, though few of Hickman’s discs were ever quite that thrilling. Like those of his 1920 peers, however, they might have been manufactured with the words ‘guaranteed to propel a couple around the dance floor’ scrawled across their fragile grooves.

  In the late summer of 1920, an orchestra emerged whose leader had greater pretensions. The son of a classical conductor, Paul Whiteman had played violin with the San Francisco Symphony. In his self-aggrandising autobiography, simply titled Jazz (1926), he recalled how he had first met this intoxicating music ‘at a dance dive15 on the Barbary Coast. It screeched and bellowed at me … my whole body began to sit up and take notice. It was like coming out of blackness into bright light.’ His infatuation was consummated in 1919, when he met composer and arranger Ferdie Grofé. Late of Art Hickman’s band, Grofé has been credited by scholar James Lincoln Collier as the man who ‘came up with the idea16 of the dance-band “arrangement”. Until this time bands had generally played chorus after chorus of the tune in the same way, for as long as was required. It was Grofé’s idea to vary the music from chorus to chorus, now poising the saxophones against a trombone line, now allowing the banjo to solo, now pitting the trumpet against the saxes.’

  This simple and (in retrospect) obvious innovation transformed the history of twentieth-century popular music. It provided structure where previously anarchy had raged; introduced sophistication to raw ingredients; and allowed each bandleader (and his arranger) to create his own trademark sound and style. Every combination of horns, woodwinds and strings would become as recognisable to aficionados as would a singer’s timbre. In collaboration, Whiteman and Grofé made a vital decision: the refinement they had inhaled from their classical training should be applied to the previously impromptu art of the dance band. Their creation, the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, would beguile America and then Europe, establish the template for the ‘sweet’ dance sound that dominated the 1920s and 30s, and – in the opinion of subsequent critics and fans – cause lasting harm to the reputation of jazz.

  Those who like his music17 refuse to patronize a dance hall and mingle with the masses; while dance hall patrons won’t pay $2 to get into a Whiteman concert.

  New York Clipper newspaper, 1922

  Paul Whiteman was known18 as the King of Jazz and no one as yet has come near carrying that title with more certainty and dignity. He ‘dressed her in woodwinds and strings’, and made a lady out of jazz.

  Duke Ellington

  It was unfortunate that the self-styled ‘King of Jazz’ bore a striking resemblance to comedian Oliver Hardy, and that his nickname became the title of a 1930 movie which belittled the race who had given jazz life. Paul Whiteman was certainly not the King of Jazz, or its inventor; nor, despite the crude animations of monkey-like ‘natives’ in his controversial movie, was he a racist. By his own account: ‘All I did was to orchestrate jazz19. If I had not done it, somebody else would have.’ Whiteman’s tragic flaw was combining the trappings of a jazz dance band with acutely tasteful orchestrations. He emerged with a sound that was highly commercial, creative, coherent, filled with gorgeous melodic and harmonic touches – and amounted to a travesty of jazz.

  His most successful recordings were his earliest: sides such as ‘Whispering’, ‘Japanese Sandman’ and ‘Wang Wang Blues’, each of which borrowed the novelty elements of the first white jazz bands and coated them with lush romanticism. With his 1921 rearrangement of a Rimsky-Korsakov theme, ‘Song of India’, Whiteman’s work shed even its token allegiance to jazz, and anticipated the purveyors of ‘easy listening’ music. By 1923, melody had supplanted rhythm as his music’s most potent ingredient. Yet Whiteman also introduced two of the most significant American performers of the era: Bix Beiderbecke and Bing Crosby. And as proof of what could be achieved in the abandoned ground between popular music, light music, jazz and classical, there was Whiteman’s 1932 recording of Ferdie Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite, part overture, part blueprint for one of songwriter Jimmy Webb’s most expansive late 1960s ballads.

  It was Whiteman’s epic grasp of American music that made him perhaps the only possible collaborator for a young man in his mid-20s who, like Whiteman, had been thrilled by jazz, but wanted to paint on a larger canvas. Jacob Gershvin – better known today as the anglicised George Gershwin – was a genius who by his twentieth birthday had recorded hundreds of player piano rolls, and composed the 1919 stage musical La-La-Lucille! He wrote ‘Swanee’, a hit for Al Jolson, and unconsciously echoed Scott Joplin in his ambition to base an opera on ‘Negro’ music.

  Gershwin first met Paul Whiteman in 1922, on the set of a theatrical revue. The following autumn, he staged an ambitious recital in New York at which he mixed contemporary American songs (including his own) with modernist classical pieces by the likes of Arnold Schönberg. Gershwin’s fearless presentation inspired Whiteman to pursue his own cross-fertilisation of styles: a concert performance which would demonstrate the validity of music he described as ‘symphonic jazz’. The bandleader laid out his argument: ‘I intend to point out20, with the assistance of my orchestra, the tremendous strides which have been made in popular music from the day of discordant jazz, which sprang into existence about ten years ago from
nowhere in particular, to the really melodious music of to-day, which – for no good reason – is still called jazz.’

  Gershwin agreed to provide a new ‘symphonic’ piece for the event, which had been christened ‘An Experiment in Modern Music’. He then forgot about the commission until three weeks before the event, whereupon he concocted a medley of themes, which he titled American Rhapsody. It was his brother Ira who suggested the more painterly description: Rhapsody in Blue.

  The debut of this haunting and episodically brilliant union between the serious and the popular followed less than two weeks after the belated American premiere of an even more dramatic intervention in the narrative of twentieth-century music, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Yet Rhapsody in Blue did not mark a revolution in the language of music, as Stravinsky’s work had done: Gershwin was merely toying with its colour, adding distinctively American (and notably African-American) tones to the European concerto form. He remained ambivalent about the nature of his experiment, remarking the following year: ‘I do not think that serious music21 will ever be influenced by jazz, but it is quite probable that jazz will be influenced by serious music.’ The reviewer in Time magazine was alarmed by the prospect: ‘Jazz music is descending22 into the final pit of banality by becoming serious.’ Whiteman was defiant, declaring that jazz was ‘the only true American musical art23’. Gershwin’s ‘jazz concerto’ was incorporated into his repertoire, and the Whiteman orchestra sold more than a million copies of Rhapsody in Blue split over the two sides of a twelve-inch 78 rpm single (though it had to be trimmed and performed at breakneck tempo to fit on to one disc).