A DREARY YEAR

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20669, 6 March 1937, Page 14 (Supplement)

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 generallyused, means—or so it seems to me—the mass production of fast, noisy jazz with a fancy title. lam 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 the pop songs at least the writers have (a) to try to compose a tune and (b) believe heart-and-soul in it when they 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 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 sem-itic-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. Now 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. lam 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 scarcely 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.”

and all the main countries absolutely bar our artists from performing. Under the terms of my bill, it would be a two-way proposition." '

Nevertheless, the Dickstein Bill is worded: “A Bill to protect the artistic and earning opportunities in the United States for American actors, vocal musicians, operatic singers, solo dancers, solo instrumentalists, and for other purposes.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Richard Russell, new head of the Senate Immigration Committee, has expressed himself in favour of the bill. He can not see, he asserts, what objections the opponents of the bill (whose arguments he has not heard) might have.

Sources close to the President have indicated that he will sign the bill if it is passed.