Ezz-thetics a column by
THE JAZZ HISTORY OF THE WORLD (a work in progress)
“The Jazz History of the World”? The idea not of a history of music but of a history told by a piece of music may be at once preposterous and sublime. It’s posed in words as a satirical element in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece The Great Gatsby, in which it was a work performed by a New York society orchestra that appears at Gatsby’s great party in Chapter Three. It’s a work snatched from the society pages and entertainment pages, a send-up of roaring ‘20s high-low culture, “society jazz,” jazz pulled from the speak-easies and the ghetto, wrapped up in top-hat and tails and dragged to the stage of Carnegie Hall: There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra leader rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden. Fitzgerald doesn’t go into much detail about that “Jazz History,” virtually dispensing with it in the next sentence, “The nature of Mr. Tostoff’s composition eluded me, because just as it began my eyes fell on Gatsby ...”; but he was definitely alert to New York high society hits as he worked on the novel (an Ur version of the passage exists in a draft published as Trimalchio: An Early Version of 'The Great Gatsby' (2002). The New York circumstance strongly suggests George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, debuted by Paul Whiteman (as richly comic a name as Fitzgerald’s “Tossed off”). It might suggest even more closely Darius Milhaud’s La création du monde, a work aligned with the titular subject matter and one that had debuted in Paris in October 1923, just months before Whiteman debuted Rhapsody in New York in February 1924, both around the period of Fitzgerald’s composition and revisions in both cities. There’s a further antecedent in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the most notorious composition of the era. Its subtitle, “Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts,” and its various segment sub-titles invoke a dawn of human culture complete with human sacrifice, its primal energies conveyed by a fiercely modernist rhythmic and tonal vocabulary that has always endeared it to jazz musicians (I was long ago introduced to the Czech conductor Karel Ančerl’s performance by the trumpeter Ric Colbeck, more violent than any performance I’d previously heard). In 1918, Stravinsky was introduced to ragtime by the conductor Ernest Ansermet, who would conduct both Stravinsky and Milhaud works and wrote a 1918 review describing Sidney Bechet as an “artist of genius” (Ansermet’s later racist declarations would more than dull his original virtues). To varying degrees these works all connect with modernism and with what might be described as “primitivism,” but they also possess a distinctive creative reach outside cultural norms, even to Gershwin improvising some of his piano part at Rhapsody’s debut. They reach toward jazz, whatever their understanding of it, as a source of transformative vigor, connected – most notably perhaps in Fitzgerald’s satiric reduction – to retrospection and renewal. The mindset required to view these works as precedents, however unlikely, to several masterpieces of the larger jazz project hinges on the idea and meaning of the word “primitive,” something Whiteman clearly intended to refine, missing its essential virtue. The most effective definition, the shortest route from incomprehension to understanding, and contrary to how it might be employed in the starched world of Whiteman’s 1920s, is “Primitive Means Complex.” So begins the preface to one of the world’s essential books, essential before it was ever assembled, the poet Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania (first edition 1968; third edition, 2017), a near-global anthology of poetry stretching through myriad times and cultures. It’s with that definition that we might remake the “Jazz History of the World” from mockery to a meaningful category, the history of the world as told by jazz, becoming increasingly a transport, a fusion of cultures and the notion of a collective human music and experience.
THE JAZZ HISTORY OF THE WORLD: Notes Toward a Playlist
These are some of the crucial and epic episodes in the accounts by jazz of the history of the world: The immediate heir and, more significantly, antidote to Whiteman’s (and Fitzgerald’s) history is Duke Ellington, whose “Jungle Music” translates the Whiteman world into meaningful sonic discourse: thus “Rhapsody in Blue” becomes “Mood Indigo”; there’s “Concerto for Cootie,” improviser as central voice and effective composer. Eventually Ellington’s adaptations will stretch through cultural geography (The Far East Suite) and the especially hard-edged study of immediate economics (Money Jungle). The first composition sold by George Russell was called “New World,” and a few years later he created “Cubana Be/ Cubana Bop” with Chano Pozo and Dizzy Gillespie, making the modernist synthesis of contrasting cultural sources explicit. He did it still more pointedly a couple of years later with “A Bird in Igor’s Yard”. While Charlie Parker never got to study with Edgard Varèse, he certainly thought about it, and he did write something called “Anthropology,” a long-distance ancestor of “Evolution” by Grachan Moncur III. While The Modern Jazz Quartet made the jazz absorption of classical forms commonplace, that “Jazz History” became more explicit and varied. Charles Mingus’s “Pithecanthropus Erectus” is more explicit than Parker’s “Anthropology,” a history that then proceeds from “Haitian Fight Song” to Fables of Faubus. John Coltrane would create a geographical history – rhythmic, scalar, and social – with “Olé,” “Africa,” “India,” “Alabama,” and “Brazilia.” A Sun Ra epic like “The Magic City” is another “jazz history,” as is A.K. Salim’s Afro-Soul Drum Orgy, Sonny Rollins’ Freedom Suite, Max Roach’s Freedom Now: We Insist, and Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues. Each in one way or another is inspired by extended historical circumstance and informed by an underlying vision of human civilization, programmatic or musical, as is Lee Morgan’s aspirational Search for the New Land or Cecil Taylor’s highly ritualized performances like Music from Two Continents: Live at Jazz Jamboree ‘84. The monumental dimensions of certain incarnations of Evan Parker’s Electro-Acoustic Ensemble (for instance the 18-member version described in “Ezz-thetics,” Issue 31) had instrumentation stretching from shō, a wind instrument with bamboo pipes, to sampling machine, a simultaneous history of devices for making different kinds of music. Similarly, Anthony Braxton’s most expansive projects, like the Echo Echo Mirror House Music pieces and the vast Sonic Genome performance at Jazzfest Berlin 2019, might also suggest “The Jazz History of the World” as an ultimate aspiration. Viewed as an ongoing process, “TJHotW” may present a larger mode of community music making that is simultaneously representation and becoming, both creative chaos and articulation of a stage in a larger collective process, one in a sense continuous with the world.
© 2023 Stuart Broomer
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