Jazz Modernism and Film Art: Dudley Murphy and Ballet mécanique

Plus de Jazz

The idea of jazz modernism has two dimensions. The first is the acknowledgement that musicians such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Fats Waller deserve recognition for developing jazz into a modernist art music, comparable within its own genre to the innovations of modernists in other fields and media: "To call Armstrong, Waller, et al., 'modernists' is to appreciate their procedures as alchemists of the vernacular who have 'jazzed' the ordinary and given it new life."¹ The second, as I argue in this article, is the recognition that certain "jazz" principles and techniques are discernible in the works of other contemporary, modernist artists.

The story of jazz modernism is largely a history of migrations and detours, the movement of ideas and influences as well as of people, between the U.S. and Europe and back again, as well as across racial borderlines. The new jazz aesthetic represented by Ellington, Armstrong, and Waller, and the idea that jazz was becoming an art music in a way that had been quite unexpected early in the 1920s, was recognized and championed especially by European intellectuals and critics who were able to hear their music when they undertook tours of Europe in the first half of the 1930s. For example, when Louis Armstrong played in London in 1932, the Daily Herald's show business columnist Hannen Swaffer reported ordinary people walking out, leaving "excited young men of the pseudo-intellectual kind … bleating and blahing in ecstasy."² In 1934, the English critic and composer Constant Lambert claimed that he knew of "nothing in Ravel so dextrous in treatment as the varied solos in the middle" of Ellington's 1928 "Hot and Bothered," nor anything in Stravinsky "more dynamic than the final section." At around the same time, the European-based Australian composer Percy Grainger placed Ellington alongside Bach and Delius in his pantheon of composers.³

Such appraisals of jazz as art and jazz as modernism took some time to develop. At the start of the 1920s, the Bloomsbury art critic Clive Bell certainly believed that there was what he called a "Jazz theory of art," but he did not approve. In "Plus de Jazz" ("No More Jazz") he rails against the stupidity of its acolytes, "on whose banner is inscribed 'No discrimination!' 'No culture!' 'Not much thought!'"⁴ The obituary now seems shockingly premature. Bell himself reckons that the jazz movement "bounced into the world somewhere about the year 1911," the year that Irving Berlin revived ragtime with the worldwide success of "Alexander's Ragtime Band" (SC, 215). Bell was writing a decade later, in 1921, four years after the Original Dixieland Jazz Band made their raucous debut at London's Hammersmith Palais in 1917. Looking forward, this was still six years before Duke Ellington started his residency at the Cotton Club and seven years before Louis Armstrong recorded his genre-redefining "West End Blues." Timing apart, what is most surprising about Bell's attack on jazz is that, although originally written as a journal article, it appears as the final chapter to Since Cézanne (1922), the book in which he championed an emerging great tradition in modern art: the painting of "Derain, Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard, Friesz, Braque, etc." (SC, 214). Why should Bell decide to end a defense of modern painting with an attack on the modern sounds of jazz—or, rather, with an attack on the modern phenomenon of jazz, given that he offers no discussion or even description of jazz as music?⁵

That silence is itself the clue. This is about culture wars, not music criticism. Bell's aim was to discriminate between good modernism and bad modernism; jazz represents the bad modernism that he deplored and to which his good painterly modernism would provide an antidote. If, for many Americans in the 1920s, "to argue about jazz was to argue about the nature of change itself," it was equally true for European intellectuals that to argue about the significance of jazz was to adopt a stance on modernity and the aesthetics of modernism.⁶

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