Kathy J. Ogren

In Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz (1989), historian Kathy Ogren looks at the controversy over the perceived social effects of jazz music in the U.S. during the 1920s. She reviews the debate about the moral and cultural dangers associated with jazz, and how that debate was situated within a society becoming more urban and more ethnically and racially diverse.

The negative reaction to jazz came from both blacks and whites. Music with origins in the sporting house and gin joints appealed to the popular classes, but provoked the ire of the new black middle class, with its aspirations to integration and respectability. Black intellectuals of the so-called Harlem Renaissance were ambivalent. Claude McKay, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston enthusiastically incorporated black folk culture, blues and jazz into their vision of the modern black experience. W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, J.A. Rogers and Alain Locke considered black vernacular music as a valuable repository of folk history and creativity, but believed that black artists should ‘improve’ on folk materials in order to serve as ambassadors for racial pride and understanding. George Schuyler derided as ‘hokum’ any discussion of ‘Negro Art’ and a distinctive black folk culture, insisting that blues and jazz could have been produced by any ‘peasant’ group under similar circumstances.

Ogren mentions in passing that jazz musicians seemed to pay little attention to the manifestos produced by the black intelligentsia in the 1920s. As other writers have indicated, jazz began as commercial music, and jazz musicians understood themselves as entertainers. A type of race consciousness among jazz musicians does seem to have emerged later, likely as a reaction to publicists’ promotion of Paul Whiteman and Benny Goodman as “The King of Jazz” and the “The King of Swing,” respectively.

White critics focused on the moral and aesthetic qualities of jazz music, writes Ogren. The puritan strain of white reaction argued that the music ‘encouraged sexual permissiveness, interracial mixing, lascivious behavior, and a state of mind similar to alcohol intoxication.’ For aficionados, the ‘primitivism’ associated with black vernacular music was part of the attraction, providing an antidote to an increasingly overwrought industrial civilization. Critics who assumed that art ought to express beauty and symmetry regarded the simplistic melodies and syncopated rhythms of jazz as inferior and unrefined. These opponents of jazz had little understanding of or appreciation for the traditions from which sprang black music, and so could not conceive of an alternative aesthetic. ‘Jazz was a language and an experience that conveyed change,’ says Ogren, and not everyone was ready for the change.

One of Ogren’s most interesting observations is that the setting of jazz performance shaped the interactions between musicians and audience and influenced the development of the music. The evolution of popular entertainment in the U.S. brought black performers in front of white audiences, and professional entertainment networks for blacks were already shaping performance styles before the turn of the 20th century. Minstrel shows featuring song and dance acts set on plantations had been replaced by all-black musical theatre and vaudeville companies, with musicians playing ragtime and early jazz music. Audiences responded enthusiastically to the call-and-response techniques, polyrhythms and syncopation of black musicians, who were in demand in every major city. Black vaudeville, road shows and traveling theatres inspired an explosion of popular dances, and cabarets and dance halls—designed to encourage participation as well as observation—attracted more and more whites looking for a good time.

For white Americans, jazz performance locations were both escapist and participatory, says Ogren. Entertainment venues were often grouped in distinct districts within cities, in ‘enclaves of vice and excitement, danger and mystery’—a special world of leisure and sensual pleasure set apart from everyday life. Visually stimulating designs and décor combined with musical performance created an extraordinary experience for patrons accustomed to the formal distances of conventional theatre performance. With musicians wandering among the tables placed alongside the cabaret floor, the audience could feel a part of the performance. The earlier legitimization of black vaudeville and musical theatre had prepared white audiences for experiments in cabaret entertainment, writes Ogren, but ‘the minstrel legacy and lingering stereotypes trapped both blacks and whites in roles that were staged rather than authentic.’ At the Cotton Club in Harlem, for instance, ‘patrons assumed that they were part of the emotionally unrestrained practice of black music and dance, when in fact they were watching carefully orchestrated floor shows,’ entertaining themselves by watching blacks be “primitive”. Jazz performance, then, comes out of a contrived tradition, according to Ogren, not in the sense used by Albert Murray, of elaborating on the folkloric roots of blues and jazz, but in the sense deployed by Bernard Wolfe, as an illusion of spontaneity.

As syncopated dance music grew in popularity in the early part of the 20th century, more spacious ballrooms like the Grand Central Palace, the Renaissance Ballroom and the Savoy Ballroom opened (all in New York City), presenting a more sophisticated alternative to the old cabarets and dance halls. African American dances continued to provide the basis for new fads, and the dynamic between dancers and musicians led to new jazz styles. Though the roots of jazz are in live performance, new technologies made it possible to preserve and transmit music to audiences far removed from the performer: player pianos, phonograph recordings, radio and film enlarged the audience for jazz, further reshaping audience-performer interactions. In the mid-1920s, jazz tempos slowed, and larger orchestras replaced smaller bands and combos, making the music more standardized and, says Ogren, more palatable to mainstream white tastes. ‘Vernacular jazz was cleaned up as it was marketed to a mass audience.’ The separate category of race records and the relatively small number of black bands broadcast and recorded tended to reinforce distinctions between black and white music, ‘with jazz aimed at the general public mostly performed by white bands, and more accurately described as popular music with jazz influences.’

Jazz Revolution is a good example of how academic historians look at jazz, but we don’t get a real robust feel for the sound of the music like we do from oral histories or writers with an inside perspective, like Otis Ferguson or André Hodeir. Ogren also perpetuates the fallacy that jazz was divided into contrasting black and white styles. Jazz audiences were segregated, but not always. Black musicians did face greater obstacles and had fewer opportunities than white musicians, but among jazz players there was a tendency toward inclusion and acceptance quite at odds with racial attitudes in society at large (ref. Gene Lees). Allen Lowe demonstrates that jazz was just one of many overlapping and mutually influential vernacular musical forms, with few clear distinctions based on race. Rex Stewart tells of the time that the all-white Jean Goldkette Orchestra outplayed Fletcher Henderson’s group in a battle of the bands at the Roseland Ballroom in 1927. Ogren’s discussion of the setting for jazz performance suggests a fertile field for investigation, though. So what does it mean now that jazz performance comes to us from remote stages via video feeds, corners of cramped record stores, fields of grass, and digital bit streams?… (more)

I really enjoyed this book, it is everything which I expect from a social history.
It starts off tracing - or trying to trace, because nobody knows it for sure - the history of jazz, how and from what it was born, going back to African and slave music. How this changed to performance, how it became ragtime first, then jazz. What where the places where this kind of music was most frequently performed and since such places where often not too respectable (if not respectable at all), so it was that jazz. From the start, it gathered a very uncomplimentary reputation, one that over time turned into accusation of driving people crazy, breaking down all inhibitions.

The book traces the very beginning of the music in the marching bands in New Orleans, depicting a very vivid image of what it was like. Then moves to Chicago and New York (mostly) to show us the evolution of this music inside the Prohibition Era's clubs.
There are a lot of quotations from musicians who lived that era, and it's very enjoyable to read their memories. Sometimes it's like being there.

Then the author explores how jazz was perceived and lived by the black community as opposed to how it was perceived and lived by the white community. I particularly like the section devoted to jazz in Jazz Age films, because it not only explored the life of jazz in the movies, but also the changing perception of African American people and performers by viewers at large.

Really, every page is a discovery. I strongly recommend this to any lover of jazz, or, like me, fans of the Jazz Age… (more)