Hobson on Jazz

For the jitterbug, jazz is an orgy of epileptic exhibitionism. For the casual collegian or cafe socialite it is a moony, soothing stimulus to social pleasures. To a third, and smaller group of jazz fans, good jazz is a serious art with its own history, traditions and standards of criticism. Up to now the critical bible of most serious jazz lovers has been Le Jazz Hot, written by a French swing pundit, Hugues Panassie, after a study of phonograph recordings in an isolated French chateau. To Panassie's pioneering effort was added last week a second, somewhat soberer and better grounded book of serious jazz criticism: Wilder Hobson's American Jazz Music.*

Author Hobson starts off with a short account of the jazz musical language and its origins, traces its historical development from the early "spasm"' bands of New Orleans to the "Chicago Period" of the 1920s, and from there to the still-raging swing fad. A less thoughtful writer might have been content merely to describe, entertainingly, one of America's most entertaining and colorful artistic developments. But Author Hobson goes much deeper. Real Jazz is a music of "suspended rhythms," produced only when its improvisers are free from self-consciousness. Knowing that the most shouted-over is not necessarily the best, he uses his critical scalpel to divide the real thing from the huge growth of plagiarism, imitation, faddism and trickery that has battened on jazz from its very beginnings. The real thing, he finds, was always a very scarce commodity, and the reasons for its scarcity are bound up with the economic instability of a jazz artist's life, public preference for cheap vaudevillian tricks, the pressure and grind under which a commercially successful jazz artist works.

In 1917, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band gave Manhattanites their first taste of real "suspended rhythm." They went on paying money to hear a rackety, acrobatic parody of what the Dixielanders had given them. In the 1920s, when Beiderbecke and other Chicagoans were doing the subtlest sort of improvisation jazz has known, it was not they, but slick commercial showmen like Whiteman, who made big money. Swing, too, has become commercialized, tricky, exhibitionistic. Even the best of the "big name" bands seldom produce the authentic article. "Natural [jazz] music is still to be heard at its finest only under one general condition--the musicians' pleasure."

* W.W. Norton ($2.50).

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