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The Jazz Scene by Eric Hobsbawm
"How to Recognize Jazz"
This interlude may be safely skipped by the informed reader. It is addressed to readers who, while interested in the subject, know nothing whatever about jazz, are unable to recognize a jazz record when they hear one, and do not care to consult friends or relatives on the subject. It is also addressed to readers who have put the question 'What is jazz?' to aficionados and who have been met (as is extremely likely) by noise and confusion. It contains a fairly cursory description, or rather 'recognition-model', of jazz, and a brief list of some of the chief artists and some of the characteristic records in this music. There can be no firm or adequate definition of jazz, except in the most general or non-musical terms, which are of no help in recognizing it when we hear it. As we have seen, jazz is neither self-contained nor unchanging. No frontier line, but a vast border zone, divides it from ordinary popular music, much of which is in varying degrees tinged by it and mixed up with it. No fixed frontier divides it from the older types of folk-music out of which it has emerged. Until the last war the frontier between it and orthodox art music was much sharper, but even that has been made hazier by raids across it from either side. As we have also seen, jazz has in its short history changed to a remarkable degree, and there is no guarantee at all that it will stop changing. Just as a definition of jazz which described it adequately in 1927 had to be modified and widened to describe the jazz of 1937, and again to describe that of 1957, so it is extremely probable that any incautious description today will in turn grow out-of-date. Jazz lovers and jazz critics, inhabitants of an argumentative and exclusive universe, have tried to find arbitrary definitions which will safely separate 'jazz' from 'pop music', or whatever they consider the 'true jazz' from its degenerations. It cannot be done; not because it is impossible to make and establish such conventional definitions—the orthodox arts are doing it all the time—but because jazz, being a modern popular art, has hitherto lacked the authorities and institutions which can make such definitions stick.
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Army musical schools, singing masters, and ballet academies may impose a 'correct' way of playing cornets, singing coloratura, or moving one's feet, which can be broken only by deliberate technical revolution or secession. Tradition, in custom-bound pre-industrial societies, can impose an equally 'correct' repertoire for the player, dancer, or singer. But jazz is in the position of the famous Hollywood producer who, when told he could not put a rendering of Mozart playing the Blue Danube Waltz into a film biography of that composer, said: 'Who's going to stop me?' Nobody. There is a difference between jazz in the strict sense and commercial pop music. There may well be a point in the evolution of jazz where it might be better to stop calling it by that name. But it is in its nature a music without precise boundary lines. Nevertheless, as a rough guide it may be said that jazz, as it has developed up to the present, is music which contains the following five characteristics; jazz-coloured pop music contains some of the first three or four but not the last, or the last only in considerable dilution:
1. Jazz has certain musical peculiarities, which arise mainly from the use of scales not usually employed in European art music, but derived from West Africa; or from the mixing of European and African scales; or from the combination of African scales with European harmonies. The best-known expression of these peculiarities is the combination of the `blue' scale—the ordinary major scale with the third and seventh approximately flattened—which is used for melody, and the common major scale, used for harmony. (The flattened notes are the so-called 'blue notes'.)
2. Jazz leans heavily, and probably fundamentally, on another African element, rhythm. Not indeed in the African forms, which are normally much more complex than most jazz. However, the element of constant rhythmic variation, which is quite vital to jazz, is certainly not derived from the European tradition. Rhythmically jazz consists of two elements: a steady and unchanging 'beat' —normally two or four to a bar, at least approximately—which may be stated or implied, and a wide range of variations round it. These may consist of various kinds of syncopation.
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(the placing of an accent on a normally unaccented beat or the omission of an accent from a normally strong one), or of a much subtler ranging round the beat, placing the accent just before or after it, or of other devices such as 'attack' and intensity. The interplay of the various jazz instruments, each of which has rhythmic as well as melodic functions, complicates the matter further. Rhythm is essential to jazz: it is the organizing element in the music. It is, however, extremely difficult to analyse, and some of its phenomena, such as that vaguely called 'swing', have so far resisted analysis altogether. They can merely be recognized. It is for instance difficult to see why good drummers, while maintaining a rock-steady beat, can and do give the or 'driving'.
3. Jazz employs peculiar instrumental and vocal colours. These derive in part from the use of instruments uncommon in art music, for though jazz has no specific instrumentation, it happens that the jazz orchestra has evolved out of the military orchestra, and therefore normally uses string instruments very little and brass and woodwind for purposes unusual in
sensation of continuous acceleration, symphony orchestras. It also uses exotic instruments from time to time, e.g. vibraphones, bongo-drums, and maracas. However, in the main the colour of jazz comes from a peculiar and unconventional technique of playing all instruments, which developed because many of the pioneer jazz musicians were entirely self-taught. They therefore escaped the long-established conventions of European art music as to the 'correct' way of using instruments or trained voices. This standard European convention has aimed at the production of a pure, clear, accurate instrumental tone and of a voice as nearly as possible like a special kind of instrument. The simplest way of explaining the jazz tone is to say that it automatically and spontaneously took the opposite road. Its voice is the ordinary untrained voice, and its instruments, so far as possible, are played as though they were such voices. (It is even reported that the great cornetist King Oliver, when on bad terms with his bandsmen, refused to talk to them and 'talked' to them only by means of his cornet, or that 'eighty-five per cent of what Lester Young says on the sax you can understand'. There is no such thing in jazz as an illegitimate tone: vibrato is just as legitimate as pure tone, 'dirty' ones as clean one's.
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Some players, influenced by orthodox music, have from time to time—notably in cool jazz—experimented with orthodox instrumental tones, but so far as jazz is concerned this is merely another proof that any sound which comes out of the instrument is a le-gitimate sound. Jazz players are also great ex-perimenters who try to explore the utmost technical resources of their instruments, for instance, by trying to play a trumpet with the flexibility of woodwind, or a trombone in the normal register of the trumpet. Such pieces of often excessive craftsman's bravura produce their own unorthodox tone-colours. But at bottom jazz has used instruments as voices for most of its history. Since the voices on which the instru-ments based themselves, and what they had to say or felt, belonged to a particular people living in specific conditions, the colours of jazz all tend to belong to a particular and recognizable spectrum. For instance, it is rather likely that, if brass and reed instruments had been developed in an analogous way by Bengalis or Chinese rather than by Southern Negroes, their sounds, though equally unorthodox by conventional European standards, would be very different. The pitch and inflexion, the general pattern of expression, are obviously not the same in Dacca or Canton as in Vicksburg.
4. Jazz has developed certain specific musical forms and a specific repertoire. Neither are of very great importance. The two main forms used by jazz are the blues, and the ballad, the typical popular song adapted from ordinary commercial music. The blues, an extraordinarily powerful and fruitful foundation of jazz, is normally in music a unit of twelve bars and in words a rhyming couplet of iambic pentameters (the blank verse line) with the first line repeated. The pop ballad varies, but is often of a standardized thirty-two bar type. Both, in simple or complex forms, serve as the basis of musical variation. The repertoire consists of so-called `standards'—themes which, for one reason or another, lend themselves to profitable jazz playing. They may be drawn from any source, the traditional blues and the current popular song being the most important. 'Standards' tend to vary from one style or school of jazz to another, though some have proved suitable for all. The listener
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who hears a band announce the title of one of these—either a blues, say, or one of the evanescent pop songs of the past which have been given permanent life as jazz standards—can be pretty certain that the band at least intends to play jazz. (It does not follow that it will.) Once he knows his way around he will probably also know by the title what type of jazz the band intends to play: there was a time when "Margie" or "Avalon" would almost certainly produce a 'Dixieland' number; "Christopher Columbus" a number in the style of the thirties; "How High the Moon" or a Cole Porter number, 'modem' jazz. By now a body of more elaborate jazz compositions or arrangements is also in existence.
5. Jazz is a players' music. Everything in it is subordinated to the individualities of the players, or derives from a musical situation when the player was supreme. A musician or impresario who wishes to get together a jazz band looks round not merely for so many trumpets, trombones, reeds, etc., but like a producer casting a play, or a selector of a goods sports team, for a Buck Clayton on trumpet, a Henry Coker on trombone, a Sonny Rollins on tenor sax.
Until recently the composer, the key figure in Western art music, was, with rare exceptions, a wholly secondary figure in jazz. His place was taken, if at all, by the modestly and correctly named 'arranger'. The conductor remains totally unimportant, at least in his orthodox role. The traditional jazz composition is merely a simple theme for orchestration and variation. A piece of jazz is not reproduced, or even recreated, but—ideally at least—created and enjoyed by its players every time it is played. Hence—once again ideally—no two performances of the same piece by the same band should be exactly alike, and if two performances of the same piece by different bands sound identical, even in the same arrangement, then one of them is deliberately imitating the other. Every jazz player is a soloist, and just as the operatic listener ought to be able to recognize the voice of Flagstad or Schwarzkopf after a bar or two of an aria, so the jazz listener ought to be able to identify Armstrong, or Hodges, or Miles Davis—or, if he is very expert, some scores or hundreds of lesser recorded players—after a few notes.
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It is therefore natural that individual and collective improvisation plays an immense part in jazz. A good deal of nonsense is naturally talked about this. Jazz musicians play a limited repertoire far too often, and the possibilities of improvisation on a given theme are in practice too limited for their performance not to become standardized to some extent.
Literate musicians find scored music too convenient not to use it. Just so it is quite certain that even such improvised performances as those of the old commedia dell'arte in time settled down into routines, collections of standardized gestures, expressions, and business which actors would string together, quite possibly recording them in a rough sort of notation. To talk as though the only legitimate jazz was the one which was never heard before is silly romanticism. (Anyway, what is wrong with a player who, having hit on a good idea and elaborated it in a series of performances, decides to stick to what he now regards as an adequate solo?) Jazz is not simply improvised or unwritten music. But it must, in the last analysis, be based on the individuality of particular musicians, and very likely on their actual improvisations, and it ought to leave room for improvisation.
Nor is this difficult, for even with great technical efforts jazz cannot at present be adequately noted down on paper, and if it could, would almost certainly be far too complex for players to sight-read, and per-haps even to learn from the score. A piece of jazz, unless recorded, copied by ear, and checked against the record (which in jazz takes the place of the score) time and again, cannot be reproduced by anyone else even in approximately identical form. The effort to do so has sometimes been made, for instance by devoted `traditionalists' attempting to reproduce with com-plete fidelity the sound of some cherished band of the past. But for most jazz purposes—and especially for the routine of ordinary bread-and-butter perform-ance—the effort is too great to be worth the time and trouble. Most jazz scores, if they exist at all, are therefore rather simple and rough approximations, which leave at least the detail of tone, rhythm, inflexion, and the like to the jazz instincts of the players.' I do not propose to discuss the attempts to define jazz in narrower terms which have often been made; for instance, the one which holds that its essence
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“is 'collective improvisation' and that anything which lacks this characteristic is 'not jazz'. Such definitions are normally manifestoes of what jazz ought to be, not descriptions of what it actually is. Nor is there any need to describe jazz-influenced popular music. It is extremely unlikely that any man or woman in the Western world has escaped the constant bombardment by barrages of such music from theatres and cinemas, records, dance bands, radio, and television. Much of this music, though disavowed by the strict jazz-lovers, claims to be jazz—generally by adopting one of numerous trade names such as 'jazz', 'hot', `swing', 'jive', 'cool', 'ragtime', 'blues', 'bop', 'syncopation', 'rhythm', `dixieland', and the rest, not counting the names of dances. (Such trade names change rapidly with fashion: a dance band wishing to advertise its connexions with jazz would, in the early 1920s have said it played 'jazz' or 'syncopation,' in the late twenties 'hot' or 'dirty,' in the thirties 'swing' and so on.) Just as there has always been a public which actively dislikes the idea of jazz, so there has always been one, including the jazz-lovers but much more numerous, which is strongly attracted by the idea of jazz. Since pop music exists by selling itself on the market to buyers, the jazz trade-mark has been a distinct selling point from time to time. At the risk of offending purists, it must be said that such hybrid and diluted jazz has a perfect right to the name. Though the jazz-lover may have fits at the idea, the reporter can no more deny the right of the late Paul Whiteman to call himself a jazz musician, the late Al Jolson a jazz singer, or the least and most cretinous rock-and-roller to claim jazz citizenship than the literary critic can deny the right of the average businessman to claim that he writes English. The world of jazz as a cultural phenomenon of our times includes anything that calls itself jazz, or borrows enough from the jazz idiom to be significantly affected by it. However, just as the critic who writes about English literature will not spend his time on business letters or Christmas-card doggerel, so the jazz-lover need not trouble much about the technicalities of pop music, except in so far as it has influenced the sort of jazz which is, rightly, the subject of critical enjoyment and appreciation.
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