Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class (review)

What, exactly, do jazz and theatre have to do with each other? The answer, according to David Savran's intelligent new book, Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class, may be found in sociology.

Savran's hero — "the man whose spirit has presided over the composition of this book" (10) — is the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose work has included worlds of artistic creativity (The Field of Cultural Production) and taste (Distinction). Bourdieu disliked the artificial boundaries sacralizing art as a realm distinct from everyday life. He preferred to see art as a "field of power," operating according to the same rules as all human endeavour. The more commercial arts (musical comedy, jazz) can be easily understood as capitalist enterprises, but the more "elevated" arts, such as legitimate theatre, disguise matters by turning the marketplace on its head. For fiscal capital, they substitute cultural and symbolic capital (as defined by its gatekeepers — critics, connoisseurs). True art may not "sell," but it nevertheless assumes a dominant role in the culture.

For many, "theatre" in the 1920s might simply mean Eugene O'Neill, the founder of modernist American drama and, ultimately, the focus (or target) of Savran's argument. But, in this book, Savran insists on placing O'Neill's highbrow triumph within a broader picture. As anyone knows who has read Lawrence Levine's similarly titled Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Harvard UP, 1988), theatre since the nineteenth century has been an undisciplined, democratic mess, yielding gradually, by the 1920s, to a more socially stratified scene, with legit theatre perched on top of vaudeville and burlesque. Yet the mass appeal of jazz (high and low, black and white) profoundly unravelled all categories.

Of course, there are similar problems with definitions of jazz, especially in the 1920s. Current scholarship draws us to a clearly defined musical tradition of recordings by a handful of African American artists (for "Eugene O'Neill," substitute "Louis Armstrong"). Yet those actually living in the "Jazz Age" had a much looser sense of what the term meant: the show tunes of George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Irving Berlin, the saxophone-dominated dance music heard at smart parties, the elaborate pretentions of "symphonic jazz," and the improvisational quality of pit bands on vaudeville stages. This diversity has now simply been banished. For example, the "King of Jazz," bandleader Paul Whiteman, is virtually written out of jazz textbooks.

Savran prefers the broader definition of jazz: it is less a musical style than an improvisational approach to performance that permeates popular culture and finds its natural home onstage. (This makes sense. According to the musicologist Lawrence Gushee, the term jazz came not from music — its originators in New Orleans referred to it as ragtime — but from the vaudeville circuit.) Much of Highbrow/Lowdown is devoted to taking this new jazz theatre seriously. Savran is fascinated by the jazz-inspired musicals of Gershwin (Lady, Be Good!; Tip-Toes) and explores the vigorous debate pitting mainstream critics like Gilbert Seldes (author of The 7 Lively Arts) against the defenders of legitimate theatre. He is equally intrigued by the avant-garde, which found jazz a perfect symbol for the alienating quality of the American present — noisy, deafening, and racial, simultaneously machine-like and primitive.

But the heart of Savran's argument focuses on technology and demographics. Film destroys the lower forms of mass theatre, relentlessly siphoning away their audiences. By the 1930s, burlesque and vaudeville were all but dead. Legitimate theatre — increasingly restricted to New York — survived but needed to shore up its financial base if it were to be more than the plaything of the upper classes. This new audience was drawn from the exploding population of "salaried, white-collar employees," labouring "not in production, but in service, distribution, coordination, and sales" (144). Such a claim is tricky to prove, since sociological data in the...