January 3, 1999

A Racial Divide That Needn't Be

By RICHARD M. SUDHALTER

Sooner or later, the political polarization disrupting the rest of the arts was bound to become a salient feature of that prominent microcosm known as the jazz world. Not surprisingly, the fault line is racial, with critics and too many musicians implying or declaring outright that jazz is simply "African-American music." In their view, contributions by whites, especially in the formative pre-World War II days, are musically expendable.

This emerging orthodoxy proclaims that there were no major white innovators and few white soloists of real distinction; that the best white players were little more than pale (in both senses) copies of black originals, and that in any case they affected only other white musicians. Even those black jazzmen who took inspiration from whites did so only when no other models were available, the theory goes, and by some combination of instinct, heritage, and genes were naturally more adept at the game.

The underlying assumption, now also shared by legions of fans, is that jazz is somehow more "authentic" when played by blacks.

It's actually an old view, first bruited about in the 1930's by the dominant cadre of jazz writers then, a group that emerged from the political far left, coupling a zeal for social justice with a well-rehearsed political agenda. Their ground-breaking criticism was at once shaped and skewed by ideas that were ideological before they were musical.

Jazz musicians, in the main, paid little heed. They were too busy making music -- music that was, at its best, profoundly pluralist; stylistic difference produced cross-fertilization, respect and artistic growth. In most cases, the unity of the bar line was strong and elastic enough to thrive against pressures from both ideologues and society at large.

We now live in different times. The rage for multiculturalism in the arts has granted belated, often extravagant, recognition to many hitherto undervalued black artists and writers. Applied to jazz, such realignment of perspective (allied with the kind of ex post facto condemnation of long-ago social norms known to historians as "presentism") has also produced an imbalance, a shoe-on-the-other-foot reconception of jazz history that minimizes the role of whites or, in some prominent instances, airbrushes them out of the picture altogether.

Cultural and racial politics have deeply divided even jazz musicians themselves. Those responsible for the schism, whatever their motives, have fostered fractiousness and fracture, rivalry and mutual suspicion, near-beatification of some figures and shameless neglect of others. In sum, a dynastic view of jazz history: black masters, and white (when present at all) acolytes and exploiters.

It's been too easy to justify such tampering as feeding a noble goal: granting American blacks -- particularly urban, high-risk black youth -- the worthiest of birthrights, a lineage brimming with estimable role models. In that visualization, every black child growing up in the United States in the next century can place himself or herself at the core of what is best in the popular culture.

But the architects of that vision have falsified the record, indulging in what Plato calls, in "The Republic," the "Noble Lie." Some circumstances allow "beneficial fictions," perversions of fact in the interests of outcome, or the higher good, Plato has Socrates telling Glaucon. In the case of jazz, the noble lie is achieved at great cost. The true losers may be neither the white musicians of the historical past nor their descendants, now laboring against strong racial currents in today's music business, but rather the intended beneficiaries, American blacks; the message they receive is of a black cultural preserve, invaded and colonized by white America, and now being "reclaimed." At its heart, it is a message of divisiveness and disunity, of balkanization.

Mounting scholarly evidence, meanwhile, documents a significant and creative white presence in "hot music" from its inception, even in the cradle, turn-of-the-century New Orleans. The matter of "influence," so highly valued in this music, is seen at almost every stage to have been two-way, with many white individuals and ensembles exerting powerful and lasting effect on colleagues of both races.

How much more laudable, and ultimately more beneficial, it might be for youngsters and fans alike to learn that once upon a time, in at least one important field, black and white worked communally, defying racial and social norms to create a music whose graces reflected the combined effort. Multiculturalism, then, not as an encoded synonym for black America getting its own back from The Man, but as living proof that races and ethnic groups can cooperate to the common good.

Black jazzmen of the pioneer generations were unhesitating in expressing respect for white musicians like Bix Beiderbecke, Adrian Rollini, Joe Venuti, Jack Teagarden, Miff Mole, Frank Trumbauer, Steve Brown, Benny Goodman, Dave Tough and Eddie Lang. More than once, Louis Armstrong hailed Bunny Berigan, a white, as his favorite among fellow trumpeters. The tenor saxophone pioneer Coleman Hawkins advised young fans to listen to his band of choice, the white Casa Loma Orchestra, for lessons in ensemble teamwork. Records played a key role, crossing color lines with ease, permitting black and white musicians to hear and learn from one another with a regularity seldom available on the job. The saxophonist Eddie Barefield loved to recall the expression on 17-year-old Lester Young's face when, one snowy night in Bismarck, N.D., the future "Prez" first heard "Singin' the Blues," as performed on record by Frank Trumbauer, whose dry, witty saxophone style became Young's chief inspiration.

Many white musicians found black ways of swinging and phrasing irresistible and set out to emulate them; to that degree it can be said that blacks taught whites to swing in a loose, relaxed manner. But so, too, did black soloists and ensembles absorb precedents in harmony, form, melodic and thematic organization, timbre, texture, tonal color and blend from white colleagues. It is the nature of mutuality in art, after all, a grand colloquy in which each participant brings something to the table.

Even if apocryphal, Louis Armstrong's oft-quoted remark to Jack Teagarden: "You an ofay, I'm a spade. Let's blow!" therefore enjoys a rich contextual resonance. The music was the thing: if it worked, the rest -- including the races of the players -- hardly mattered.

Certainly there was nothing of, "You play O.K. for an ofay" in Armstrong's deep and frequent expressions of love for Teagarden, or for the cornetist Bobby Hackett's tender lyricism. Why, then, does a black creationist orthodoxy persist?

Part of the answer appears to involve the blues, particularly for those who find blues accents, inflections and emotions indispensable to jazz. Albert Murray's "Stompin' the Blues," for example, revived the thesis, much discussed in the 1920's and subsequently discredited, that what has come to be called jazz is only an outgrowth, an extension, of the blues. As Murray reads it, the blues is central to the American black experience and even defines the essence of it. If the blues embodies the black experience, and jazz is the blues, he reasons, does it not follow that jazz itself defines the American black experience?

B EYOND argument, the blues in all its manifestations -- urban and rural, secular or sacred -- carries in its ebb and flow the ultimate majesty of black expression. Its diversity, a mixture of complexity and simple declaration, lends it a power unique in cultural history. But the leap from there to its identification as the substance of jazz is more problematic. For many white musicians, the blues may indeed have been, in Amiri Baraka's phrase, a "learned art." But that was equally true for great numbers of prominent black jazzmen, among them Teddy Wilson, Art Tatum, Fats Waller and even the saxophone icons Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter.

Beyond dispute, the blues has been a rich ingredient in jazz, but not the entirety -- and certainly not equally indispensable to all styles. Other formative components include ragtime, Tin Pan Alley, late 19th-century European concert and dance music, grand opera, minstrel and vaudeville traditions of both races, the white folk music of Appalachia and, perhaps most of all, the concert bands so ubiquitous in turn-of-the-century America.

How was it possible, as in the case of the white New York circle of 1920's jazzmen, to evolve a full and deeply creative genre of rhythmic improvised music with almost no reference to the blues vocabulary? What explains the utterly blues-free virtuosity of the Harlem "stride" piano style? It is impossible to write off so large and diverse a body of music and players as merely failed aspirations to a single ideal.

If not the blues, then, and absent other objective documentation, what can be adduced to support the idea of jazz as a uniquely, or exclusively, black art? Can color, or even the historical experience of a racial group, be legitimately invoked as a determinant for so multifarious an artistic endeavor? In any other context, such claims would be laughed out of court as a racialist atavism, a thinly disguised variant on "they all got rhythm," summoning the unwelcome shade of Comte Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a 19th-century racial theorist. Black and white players in the segregated early days made "hot music" in often quite different ways. In this particular, at least, Baraka has it right when he remarks (in "Blues People") that "jazz as played by white musicians was not the same as that played by black musicians, nor was there any reason for it to be."

"The music of the white jazz musicians did not issue from the same cultural circumstances," Baraka said.

But they were active in the game, and in large numbers, from the start, whether as innovators, admired and influential virtuosos, members of style-setting ensembles, ground-breaking arrangers, iconoclasts and individualists or just skilled journeymen.

White and black records of the same numbers, using comparable instrumentations, show marked differences. Hoagy Carmichael's 1928 Indiana Collegians whooping through his own "March of the Hoodlums" sound quite unlike Duke Ellington's orchestra reading the same score a year later. Jelly Roll Morton and Red Nichols lend vastly different perspectives to the latter's 1926 "Black Bottom Stomp." Louis Armstrong's "Hot Seven" and Bix Beiderbecke's "Gang" produce dissimilar but equally inspiring results on almost exactly contemporaneous 1927 records.

Traditionally, business imperatives have played a key role in fostering perception of jazz as a predominantly black idiom. Interested less in social reform than in profit, the machinery of music-as-business regularly exploited black popular artists of the 20's and 30's. But marketplace imperatives also worked against white musicians: late-20's record companies, for example, regularly hired black bands to record "hot music" while using their white counterparts chiefly to dispense lively pop novelties. There was little call for a black ensemble (like Fletcher Henderson's) that played waltzes well, or a white outfit that excelled at hot instrumentals, as did the Jean Goldkette Orchestra. Posterity, accordingly, has little recorded evidence of the prowess that allowed Goldkette's musicians, including the cornetist Beiderbecke, to outswing Henderson's men in a 1926 "battle of music" at Roseland Ballroom, as reported by such Henderson sidemen as the cornetist Rex Stewart.

The racial emphasis has shifted dramatically, but the marketplace remains resolutely profit-driven. Today's major record companies continue to push Billie Holiday as a black tragic heroine, saturating their catalogues with lavishly (and pricey) reissues while admirers of Mildred Bailey and Connie Boswell -- both white, both widely regarded in their time as Holiday's easy peers -- must meanwhile look hard to find single CD's of their work. Fortunately hundreds, even thousands, of records exist as evidence that white jazzmen of the pre-World War II years were as good and as important as their champions insist. Numerous reissue programs, mostly undertaken by small European labels, have made the music of white soloists and bands widely and readily available to the dedicated collector.

It's possible for anyone seeking the whole picture to experience the musicianship of pioneer groups like The New Orleans Rhythm Kings and Original Memphis Five; the bardic reveries of Beiderbecke, Teagarden's eloquence, Rollini's grace, Red Norvo's subtlety and the gloriously surrealistic imagination of Pee Wee Russell.

The great black musicians remain a dominant presence, helping to shape the work of their white colleagues as surely as white traditions, attitudes and musicianship helped shape theirs. Any attempt to look at the totality without regard to Armstrong, Ellington, Hawkins, Lester Young, Henry Allen and other pivotal figures is folly. Their primacy, and the reverence in which they are held, is the foundation on which the entire edifice rests.

But we must also hear Bud Freeman as an independent and eloquent tenor sax stylist; Dave Tough as, in Lionel Hampton's words, "the most imaginative drummer we ever had in the business"; Bob Crosby's orchestra not as a Dixieland variant on the swing formula of the 1930's but as a highly motivated ensemble packed with vivid soloists, united by a rare communality of musical thought.

There is no point in replacing one exclusionist canon with another; differences still exist, as the singularity of Bill Evans, Lee Konitz, Gary Burton and others attests. But now, as more than a half-century ago, it is only by peering through both lenses of the stereopticon that a viewer can win the depth perception essential to appreciating the three-dimensionality of a scene. Either lens, used by itself, grants only a two-dimensional effect, flat and lifeless.

As for historical revisionism, it is well to heed Barbara Tuchman's 1971 address to a National Archives conference. To truly understand the past, she said, we must resist the comforts of retrospective judgment. "I try not to refer to anything not known at the time," she said. "To understand the choices open to people of another time, one must limit oneself to what they knew: see that past in its own clothes, as it were, not in ours."

Just so. If jazz with all its traditions is to survive as a creative entity, and someday even flourish again, there must be a coming together, a rejection of fragmentation, a revival of real pluralism and shared curiosity. A return, in brief, to what one writer lauded recently (and with a deliberate nod to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) as "a safe haven from the storms of ideology, a meritocracy of comrades in which . . . players are judged not by the color of their skin but the content of their choruses."