JAZZ OF THE 1940’s

Press, Volume C, Issue 29626, 23 September 1961, Page 3

JAZZ OF THE 1940’s

Jazz Era. Edited by Stanley Dance. Mac Gibbon and Kee. 253 pp.

A competent sociologist could find endlessly satisfying material in the jazz of the 1940’s and its followers; the decade—which began chronologically in 1940 but effectively in 1937 when Lester Young came out of Kansas City with Count Basie’s band —was in an aesthetic sense the most turbulent and most critical in the history of jazz. In 1940 the big swing bands reigned supreme. America was in a new era of prosperity after the depression and the bands of the “swing era’’ were a reflection inside jazz of that prosperity. But even in. 1940 the seeds of revolt were obvious. Lester Young had anticipated them; and at Minton’s Playhouse, an afterhours night club in Harlem, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Christian, Kenny Clarke, Thelonious Monk and a host of lesser musicians had begun the “jam sessions” which germinated modern jazz. The war and the sociological changes which followed it brought about the end of the big bands, and the latter half of the 1940's saw a shortlived “New Orleans revival,'’ in whtoh a handful of old men like the veteran trumpeter Bunk Johnson were brought from retirement to make records which attemp-

ted vainly to recapture their past glory but did little more than cut the legends of the pioneers to life size. It saw also the final consolidation of the "bebop” revolution of Minton's into modem jazz and the birth of "cool jazz.” The jazz public, which has a notoriously short memory, has forgotten most of this or has entered jffez in the last few years, since it became history. This, of course, -is hardly surprising; the jazz of the 1940’s has not been well documented and Mr Dance’s book, inadequate though it may be, is the first in the field. Volume one of a series to cover the four decades since 1920, it consists of a brief introductory chapter in which Mr Dance sums up the decade, interviews with two musicians, and over 200 pages of brief, competently written biographies of prominent musicians by Yannick Bruynoghe, Max Harrison, Hughes Panassie, Charles Wilford and Mr Dance.

Collectors will probably want to buy it for the latter. Mr Dance’s summary of the period breaks no new ground and barely touches the main issues, so the book has little else to offer. How much, for example, could a competent sociologist make of the fact that most of the "reactionaries” involved in the "New Orleans revolution” were white? The younger Negro jazzmen were busy creating modern jazz.