Serious Jazz

Jazz music is descending into the final pit of banality by becoming serious. The other evening Paul Whiteman with his Palais Royal band treated Manhattan to a formal jazz recital in a concert hall. It was billed solemnly as a recital of the true and indigenous American music, from which all native American music presumably is to spring. As press-agentry it was too good not to have had some such motive among its unmentioned purposes. However, Whiteman made a speech which rang straight from his heart. He mourned and denounced the contempt with which jazz is held by the practitioners and fanciers of high-brow music, and pronounced jazz to be serious art, "the only true American musical art." Many exponents of jazz put on a varnish of this same opinion, but Whiteman expressed it with a peculiar fervency. He has been schooled as-an orthodox musician and presumably desires the reverence in which orthodox musicians are held and hold themselves.

The program that he directed was designed to demonstrate the thesis of the serious artistic worth of jazz. It was certainly a selection of the best of jazz and was performed in the most expert manner. As the popular dance music of the hour it was superb. But judged by the canons of high music, as Whiteman demanded, it did not seem to be so excellent. The impression left was much the same as when that subtle artist, Eva Gauthier, included in one of her programs of songs a group of jazz pieces (TIME, Nov. 12). The best of jazz has original and splendid rhythm and instrumentation, but the stalest and most banal of melody and harmony. The harmony adapts a few moderately recent quirks to the use of startling the popular ear. The themes used seem the most incredible bathos.