Paul Whiteman: Pioneer in American Music (review)

Paul Whiteman (1890-1967) was the most popular dance orchestra leader in America in the 1920s, and surely one of the most controversial figures in American popular music. Classically trained, Whiteman played viola in the Denver Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, and Minetti String Quartet. Lured by syncopated dance music, ragtime, and the intoxicating rhythms of early jazz, Whiteman organized a successful dance orchestra in California in 1918, later moving to Atlantic City, and eventually settling in New York in 1920. Recording contracts with Victor and later Columbia spread the orchestra's popularity nationwide. Whiteman's recording of "Whispering" (1920) backed with "The Japanese Sandman"—only the eleventh one-million-record seller since the birth of the recording industry—sealed his fame.

As the twenties roared, the Whiteman Orchestra swelled in size (from a few players to nearly thirty) and glory, dominating popular music entertainment. The orchestra headlined Broadway revues (George White's Scandals, Ziegfeld's Follies), held court in fabulous New York hotel ballrooms, and toured extensively in the United States and abroad. Paul Whiteman, Inc., sponsored "satellite" bands that played officially sanctioned concerts of authorized Whiteman musical arrangements. The orchestra was featured on radio (The Old Gold Hour), and in half a dozen films—most famously, The King of Jazz (1930). The Depression hit big bands hard in the 1930s, but Whiteman persevered with a smaller, brassier ensemble. Embracing the new technology of television in the 1940s, Whiteman conducted studio bands for pioneer broadcasts of Goodyear Revue, Paul Whiteman's TV Teen Club, and others. Whiteman was music director of ABC-TV until his retirement in the 1960s.

In his heyday in the 1920s, Whiteman's musical recipe served up dance music, rhapsodic arrangements of popular songs, syncopated versions of light classics, and concert music—what Whiteman called "symphonic jazz." The highlight of Whiteman's career was his much-ballyhooed "Experiment in Modern Music," at Aeolian Hall in New York, 12 February 1924. This "educational" concert was designed to show the progress of jazz from its "crude" origins to the refined heights of 1924s popular music. The showstopper of the concert, of course, was the premiere of Rhapsody in Blue, for piano and jazz band, featuring its 26-year-old Tin Pan Alley composer George Gershwin at the piano.

The same year, flushed with commercial success, Whiteman's publicity team resurrected the slogan "King of Jazz," first applied to Whiteman during a 1919 gig at the Maryland Hotel in Pasadena. Whiteman was uncomfortable with the title, but it stuck to him—for good or ill—for the rest of his life. Clearly, Whiteman knew what jazz music was, generally, and hired the best white "hot" jazz soloists he could find, often scooping them up from failed white jazz bands. Whiteman featured these hot soloists in spotlight sections of his arrangements, bookended (smothered, some say) by the entire ensemble. For years, jazz aficionados have blamed the Whiteman Orchestra's top salaries and bland stylings for the alcoholism and early death of cornetist Bix Beiderbecke (1903-1931), Whiteman's most famous hot soloist. Not surprising, then, that the "King of Jazz" publicity stunt has stuck in the collective craw of many jazz performers, fans, and writers for decades.

So Don Rayno's enormous new biography of Whiteman begins on the defensive. Editor Norman P. Gentieu, in "Some Comments," describes jazz writers Marshall Stearns and Otis Ferguson as "early Whiteman bashers, whose eager-beaver epigones are still around today and still slicing the same stale baloney" (p. ix). William Youngren, in the excellent foreword, takes on the Beiderbecke fans, arguing that Beiderbecke loved the discipline of the Whiteman Orchestra, was alcoholic before joining Whiteman, and succumbed in spite of Whiteman's efforts to keep him healthy. After those sour notes, Rayno's biographical narrative (pp. 1-250) follows Whiteman to May 1930. The chronicle unfolds year-by-year, always very...