LIMITS OF JAZZ

Evening Star, Issue 18716, 19 August 1924, Page 1

LIMITS OF JAZZ

AMERICAN PROFESSOR’S WARNING

Jazz has come to receive serious consideration from the colleges. Not that a new chair has been established to leach the compelling rhythm, or that students of it may apply for honors. The Dean of the Yale Music School is gravely perturbed when he sees how New York concert halls have joined with the music halls and cabarets of Broadway to exploit it. and critics are warning composers not to overlook “the steady, whimsical metre of jazz” if they hope faithfully to represent the American spirit. Dean Smith is not out to kill jazzonly to coniine it to its proper sphere. “Any criticism of the music or of its composers is academic and uncalled for—provided jazz holds to its original purpose of entertaining people in their limes of recreation.” lint he does object when he secs serious musicians “ professing to find in jazz a veritable treasure of art which is to represent America before (he world.” In the New 'York 'Herald-Tribune’ he proceeds to point out. “one or two fallacies which lurk in the enthusiastic but careless thinking of the protagonist of jazz.” Thus: “It is commonly remarked that, jazz is ‘typical of the pulse of America,’ Yes, but of a restricted America, the America of Times square at night—dancing, dining, joking, fun-loving America. To many people, to be sure, that is America; the rest is unexplored. But where in either the verse or music of jazz can be found tho rhythm of strong, 1 fine feeling, of America at Iter work, of the thoughtful idealism of her quieter hours? Confined in the ballroom, the theatre, and the fashionable hotel, jazz can have no knowledge of the romance of the New England hills or the vast spaces of (he Western plains. Jazz is not the folk-loro of a nation.

“A second fallacy: ‘Out of this ja.zz movement will be produced at some future time the great American composer.’ What will the great man have as material for his art? A few orchestral effects, produced by queer instruments and novo! mechanical devices. Wc laugh now at what one writer calls 4 the chuckling, gurgling saxophone and the giggling clarinet,’ but the first five years of this type of humor are the easiest.

“What is bound eventually to deaden tho inventiveness of the ‘great American composer ’ is tho fact that jazz is the exploitation of just one rhythm. This rhythm is tiro original runtime of thirty years ago. There have been occasional captivating additions lo it in the form of elaborate counterpoints in jarring rhythmic dissonance, but the fundamental ‘urapaugh, um-paugh ’ and the characteristic syncopation persist through the years. Without these there is no jazz. In the nine symphonies of Beethoven there are at least fifty totally different rhythms. Recently I played a ‘Study in Jazz’ by one of the most subtly-trained Americans, ordinarily a non-jazzist. It is a thoroughly delightful piece. But I wonder what would happen if the same composer should try to match the thirty-six movements of the Beethoven symphonies with the same number of jazz studies, written under the tyranny of the one rhythm? This may he an unfair challenge, but the ‘great American composer’ of the future will have to face it.”

Jazz is American, so Dean Smith argues, in much the same way and degree as are the funny series of drawings in American newspapers. Possibly the jazz of the future will evolve into something else, something more varied than it is now. Its. main contribution, however, will always j have to be in the field of humor,