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

Much recent work in modernist studies centered on the United States and Europe has sought to understand the place of jazz as both a musical genre and a cultural phenomenon. European-based studies of jazz-inflected modernism have often focused on the music’s reception as a stimulating primitive artifact. American-based examinations of jazz have emphasized Tin Pan Alley as the formative space in which black musical traditions were first recorded and nationalized, popularizing the ragtime sounds that eventually became modern jazz. Yet few scholars have placed the birth of jazz alongside the formation of an American literary theater as well as the changing climate of cultural reception that aimed to eliminate the music’s low-down taint. It is precisely this lack that David Savran seeks to supply in his book Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class. By reading the history of jazz in relation to changes in American dramatic traditions, Savran documents not only the relationship between jazz and the theater, but also the cultural forces that operated to legitimize both.

Highbrow/Lowdown offers an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the cultural changes of the 1920s, specifically those that inspired the integration of jazz into musical theater. Savran casts the reception of jazz as a key paradigm through which to view the development of the theatrical tradition as well as American culture more broadly. In his prologue, Savran immediately dramatizes the context of his study, observing that “before the Great Depression and the national syndication of radio, theater comprised a vast array of public amusements that included vaudeville, minstrel shows, and burlesques,” in addition to “the so-called legitimate stage: drama, comedy, and tragedy” (1–2). Yet the emergence of feature-length films newly deploying pre-recorded sounds would mean the demise of these cultural institutions. Savran’s reader should not be surprised by his rendering of the tumultuous cultural context in which jazz and traditional theater emerged in the 1920s. His cover carries the quotation, “The culture clash that permanently changed American theater,” emblazoned above stills from Elmer Rice’s play The Adding Machine and J. Hartley Manners’s The National Anthem. In this way, Highbrow/Lowdown invites a diverse audience to consider the many cultural dichotomies formulated during the Jazz Age. One does not need an extensive understanding of modern American drama or jazz music to understand the implications of Savran’s argument. Written in a style that eschews the overly arcane and theoretical for an interdisciplinary diction, Highbrow/Lowdown invites wide and multiple readerships.

Highbrow/Lowdown opens with a cogent analysis of how jazz was first incorporated and received by the cultural producers and critics of its day. Savran describes how jazz became a revolutionary cultural movement in America, as a working-class music of African Americans grew into a cipher for understanding the duplicitous national culture. Jazz, Savran argues, became “the symbol of a modernist revolt in a nation undergoing radical social and economic change” (13). Though this sentiment is not wholly original given today’s intense academic interest in jazz as both a musical and cultural phenomenon, the way in which Savran employs jazz as a paradigm for considering American theatrical traditions yields a fresh perspective for placing jazz within its historical and cultural contexts. In a move that epitomizes his book’s thorough scholarly research, Savran is careful to establish the critical parameters for understanding any avenue of his wide-ranging subject matter. For example, before he allows himself to begin a detailed analysis of how jazz and theater helped to define one another, he cites Max Harrison’s definition of jazz as an ephemeral music akin to “Justice Potter Stewart’s description of pornography: I don’t know how to define it but I know it when I hear it” (22–23). Ultimately, Savran cites definitions and descriptions of jazz by both early and current-day critics to settle on a...