A DREARY YEAR

Greymouth Evening Star, 13 March 1937, Page 11

A DREARY YEAR

SOMETHING ABOUT JAZZ Here is something that should set you thinking! Read this and see what “Mike,” writing in a recent issue of “The Melody Maker,” London, thinks of jazz in 1936. “Am I right in thinking that the year 1936 was about the most dreary and uneventful in the history of jazz?” he says. “Perhaps not unconnected with this dreariness is the fact that ‘Swing’ became generally known to the public during the past 12 months. “ ‘Swing,’ as the term is generally used, means —or so it seems to me — the mass production of fast, noisy jazz with a fancy title. I am not sure the majority of the stuff produced as ‘swing’ is not worse than the straight commercial dance music. ‘Swing’ in so many cases is such an obviously faked and put-up job that. I prefer the ‘straight’ jazz. With (he pop songs at least the writers have (a) to try to compose a tune and “b) believe heart-and-soul in it when tliey have composed it. “Perhaps you do not think that pop song-writers are sincere. Believe me they are. They believe with a childlike faith that ’ each and every opus they create is really something great That is what makes them such laughable, pathetic creatures. But your concocter of ‘swing’ is different. He is a faker of the worst kind. He knows a few tricks and. trots them out ‘ad nauseam.’ Just how monotonous and mass-produced this sounds you can gather if you listen 1 to some of our local bands’ broadcasts, in which ■every other number is played for the public’s benefit—the benefit of the great New Public of ‘Swing.’ “Though these compositions have different titles there is very little in them that differentiates one from another—the same orchestral cliches adorn each one, they include inevitably one overworn phrase extensively used by the Dorsey Brothers in their day; and through it all runs a rather semitic-sounding tune, which is probably the most sincere thing about the

whole job

“With the world of jazz occupied more fully than ever before; with this sort of thing, it is small wonder that 1936 has produced little or nothing of note.

“There was a time, you see,” continues the writer,| “when there was only one sort of commercial jazz—the jazz springing from the ballad barracks of Tin Pan. Alley. Noy the hitherto uncommercial has become commercial. People no longer produce ‘hot’ jazz for fun and a few fans. They produce it because the public wants it. But the public doesn’t want it to be too good. It must conform to a, pattern. Jazz is running up and down a tunnel closed, at both ends, which is inside another tunnel also closed at both ends.

“So the talent of the jazz world. is wasted in the production of mediocre music, lowering jazz to the level of a low public instead of raising the public up to the level of good jazz.

“The sooner the public tires; of ‘swing’, the better for all of us. I am only surprised that it has tolerated the monotony as long as it has.” There now, what do you think of that? With all due regard to “Mike,” I think he has got a bit too “hot” himself. It would appear that he is no lover of “swing” music! However, be that as it may, I think it is.-scarce-ly fair to make such a sweeping statement as his final sentence, because, after all, there are several types of public to please, not just one section with ideas similar to those held by “Mike.”