Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce (review)

The great musicians of classic jazz should be thought of—and taught—as bona fide modernists alongside the canonical modernist writers and visual artists, whose work, in turn, draws much on the spirit of jazz. Such are the theses of Jazz Modernism, and Appel makes his case for them not by arguing but by demonstrating how to discuss painting, sculpture, fiction, and jazz performance together productively and in much the same terms. Appel, a professor (emeritus) of English, is a marvelous close reader of Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, and their estimable cohorts, as well as of Picasso, Calder, and Carlo Carrà. Appel will not single-handedly canonize jazz outside the music department, if only because few faculty in literature, art history, and cultural studies, however simpatico, feel themselves equipped with the analytic tools to venture into music criticism or pedagogy. Yet by modeling how we might talk about jazz as one among several interconnected and equally lively modernist arts, Jazz Modernism at least makes a good start on this large problem.

Regrettably, the book also hampers its own efforts in several ways. First, despite his professional credentials, Appel is less incisive here in discussing literature than in discussing music and the visual arts. He is alive to the jazz "virtues of indirection, understatement, and scat singing" in Lachaise and Matisse, but not in Wallace Stevens or, more surprisingly, in Langston Hughes. Second, the book's theorization of modernism is troubling. Appel adroitly transcends the high-low cultural binary only to replace it with an equally insupportable divide between accessible, improvisational, and joyous "jazz modernism" and its "opposite"—a shopworn version of pessimistic, hermetic high modernism that fresh scholarship has been debunking for over a decade. Are there really two modernisms? Accessibility, suffice it to say, proves an even more capricious criterion than joyousness. And finally, Appel's prose, neither accessible nor joyous for this reader, seems a failed experiment in developing a jazz-modernist critical style. Caveat lector! It is unfortunate that Appel's worthy project is so encumbered, because his call for centralizing jazz in the modernist curriculum is fundamental and just.