JAZZ, ETC.

This isn't news, but there are several things that should be said about Aaron Copland's lecture, "Jazz and Folk-Song Influences" on modern American music which he gave several weeks ago. In dealing with the development of jazz, Mr. Copland made one assertion which rubbed our fur the wrong way--a statement which seems so basic and misleading as to call for a rebuttal.

He listed three important and co-equal phases through which popular music has passed; he referred first to "ragtime," then to "jazz," and finally to "swing." Mr. Copland defined ragtime as the primitive outgrowth of the Negro spiritual set to march time. "Jazz," he said, is a differently accented ragtime with more opportunity for improvisation and "swing" is a somewhat arranged and toned down jazz. He traced the origin of jazz and swing to the changing tastes of the public who, he said, tire of the previous style after a while.

Now to the student of "Le Jazz Hot," it is evident that swing is no more the equal brother of jazz and ragtime than "The Adventures of Ellery Queen" is the equal of the mystery stories, of Edgar Allen Poe. Poe conceived and executed his work with artistic style and taste, while the modern pulp writers often are obviously writing for five cents a word. In the same vein, it is true that "Mairzy Doats" is typical of a certain group of Americans in the twentieth century, and as such it may some day find its melody or spirit embodied in the serious composition Mr. Copland was discussing.

But it is a hundred times more likely that further classicists will prefer to make use of the authentic racial blues or jazz to achieve a nationalistic American music, just as Dvorak and Gershwin have in the past. Yes, swing is typical of a part of America--the part that is commercial and superficial, the part that is cafe society. By its very nature a compromise to public taste, it never reaches to the roots of American society, as do jazz and ragtime, since the general public always prefers to gloss over its roots.

As to the implication that "ragtime" and "jazz" have given birth to "swing" and then died because the public was bored with them, there is the irrefutable fact that more Americans today appreciate and study "jazz" than 40-odd years ago when ragtime and jazz were born in New Orleans. In those days, Americans--and Europeans--listened to symphony orchestras and military bands, and they danced only to string orchestras. Only the musicians and a small element of the Negro population knew this new American folk idiom. Today, the popularity of Duke Ellington among the name bands, the crowded bistros of New York's 52nd Street and Greenwich Village, and the prodigious increase in the issue of jazz recordings attest that people, far from becoming bored with the earliest and purest forms of folk music, are just beginning to cultivate an appreciative taste for them.