When Genres Collide

Down Beat, Rolling Stone, and the Struggle between Jazz and Rock

Matt Brennan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501319044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

When Genres Collide is a provocative history that rethinks the relationship between jazz and rock through the lens of the two oldest surviving and most influential American popular music periodicals: Down Beat and Rolling Stone. Writing in 1955, Duke Ellington argued that the new music called rock 'n' roll "is the most raucous form of jazz, beyond a doubt." So why did jazz and rock subsequently become treated as separate genres? The rift between jazz and rock (and jazz and rock scholarship) is based on a set of received assumptions about their fundamental differences, but there are other ways popular music history could have been written. By offering a fresh examination of key historical moments when the trajectories and meanings of jazz and rock intersected, overlapped, or collided, it reveals how music critics constructed an ideological divide between jazz and rock that would be replicated in American musical discourse for decades to follow. Recipient of and Honorable Mention in the PROSE Award, Music & the Performing Arts 2018.

1

Jazz Culture as a Precursor to Rock ‘n’ Roll Culture

Every parent remembers the hysteria attendant on the swing era and the Benny Goodman band whose fans danced in the aisles of the New York Paramount much as today’s fans dance to R&B. And the prophets of doom regarded that with as much dismay as do today’s critics of R&B.

RALPH GLEASON, 1958¹

[Rock] music is a source of both an emotionally intensified sense of self (as artists are heard to articulate their listeners’ own, private fears and feelings) and collective excitement, an illicit, immediate sense of solidarity and danger, an unbourgeois innocence of caution, an uncalculated directness and honesty … . What is on offer is the fantasy community of risk—such a use of music has a long history: in the 1920s and 1930s, middle-class adolescents were, for similar reasons, drawn to jazz.

SIMON FRITH, 1981²

I argued in my introduction that jazz scholarship followed a largely separate path from the rest of popular music studies. The rift between jazz and popular music has also manifested itself in the conventionally accepted history of American popular music: both popular and academic histories have tended to separate jazz—especially jazz created before World War II—from the prehistory of rock ‘n’ roll. Too many music documentaries to mention begin with a representation of the 1950s as a stultifying musical wasteland until rock ‘n’ roll revolutionized popular music culture. In the mythology perpetuated by such accounts, the roots of rock ‘n’ roll were a blend of musical sources: African-American rural country blues and urban rhythm and blues, hillbilly country and western music, and polished pop from Tin Pan Alley. According to music historian Chris McDonald, if jazz gets acknowledged at all in this framework, it is often positioned within a “simplified, perhaps caricatured, image of Tin Pan Alley, which gets portrayed as an exclusively white, middle-class milieu, somehow isolated from the diversity and turbulence of the larger American society.”³

Some scholars have challenged the common-sense blues + country + pop representation of the roots of rock ‘n’ roll. Gene Santoro, for example, proposes that American popular music history should be understood as a tangled web of interactions between jazz, blues, country, and rock, while Philip Ennis argues that at least six distinct musical streams contributed to the formation of rock ‘n’ roll: pop, black pop, country pop, jazz, folk, and gospel.⁴ However, more often than not, jazz culture—with its connotations of big bands and dance ballrooms—is represented as the musical culture from which rock ‘n’ roll broke away. Chris McDonald suggests that jazz and its culture are left out as an influence on rock ‘n’ roll for another reason as well:

jazz criticism and scholarship has been so invested in raising jazz’s status to an art music that its most commercial [pre-World War II] forms have been given little serious coverage. On the other hand, many popular music scholars have been invested in portraying rock and roll as a “revolutionary” genre, and have therefore sought to show disjuncture, not parallels, with popular music from before 1950.⁵

This chapter makes the case for the importance of jazz as a key cultural precursor to rock ‘n’ roll. In the interwar years, the words “teenage,” “teenager,” “subculture,” and “youth culture” were not yet widely in use, but that is not to say that the phenomena they described did not exist.⁶ Like rock ‘n’ roll, jazz was simultaneously vilified and valorized as mass culture, generating fans around the world who were at least as interested in the cultural commodities of recorded discs as they were in live performances. It was a teenage youth culture thought by dominant culture to be subversive and morally corrupt, prefiguring the teenage “revolution” of the baby boomer generation. It was also a powerful signifier of racial politics in America, and a commercial music that was valued for its perceived anti-commercial authenticity (or dismissed when such qualities were seen to be lacking). Indeed, these similarities between jazz and rock ‘n’ roll as genres are precisely the characteristics by which rock ‘n’ roll is normally argued to be a “revolutionary” musical moment.

I will examine these issues by focusing on how they were represented in the press coverage of jazz in its heyday, which is to say I will also consider how jazz generated such an unprecedented and rich discourse in the form of the music press—a new attendant culture of magazines, critics, and readers who routinely tackled tensions and themes that were to become central to all future discussions of popular music. This last point is crucial, as even though jazz did not make a mass impact on the same scale as rock ‘n’ roll culture—perhaps giving an opportunity for some to challenge its status as a truly “mass culture”—the discourse and debates that accompanied jazz culture are indisputably relevant to and resonant of subsequent popular music cultures, including rock ‘n’ roll. Given of the wealth of research on American jazz culture in the first half of the twentieth century, this chapter also pulls together the relevant work that best illustrates the numerous ways in which jazz culture prefigured rock ‘n’ roll culture.

The early reception of jazz

The early critical reception of jazz needs to be contextualized within broader musical discourses occurring in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Paul Lopes has researched the rise of American popular music from the perspective of Metronome,⁷ a national music periodical that was first published in January 1885 and targeted at the growing class of professional musicians. According to Lopes, Metronome’s readership of musicians struggled with what they perceived as a lack of public respect for the time and effort required for their profession, and defended their work by appealing to European standards of musical excellence:

[These musicians] viewed their role as providing the finest music available in America, what musicians and educators referred to as “good” music. “Good” music referred to the European music repertoire and legitimate techniques of professional bands and orchestras. Since most professional musicians performed for the general public, however, popular tastes and popular music constantly challenged the conception of their role in creating and promoting “good” music.⁸

Popular bandleaders during this time such as John Philip Sousa therefore “performed an eclectic repertoire and prided themselves on mediating the various tastes of their audiences while bringing ‘good’ music to the public.”⁹

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, critics in Metronome contrasted the “good” music of the “cultivated” European tradition against ragtime and early jazz. The latter genres were represented as a threat to “good” music because, it was argued, they unashamedly appealed to the lowest common denominator of public taste. Or as one article in Metronome puts it, composers of good music were being threatened by songwriters who “prostitute their talents by the writing of degrading ragtime and suggestive songs to please the taste of the perverted public … . The classical composer starves in his attic, while the illiterate one-fingered piano pounder gathers in the shekels from a generous public.”¹⁰

The quote above is an example of an attack on jazz as mass culture, and is the first of three types of attack on jazz that I want to highlight in this section. Lopes draws on the research of Lawrence Levine to demonstrate that the late nineteenth century marked the beginning of a “significant transformation in the relation between high art and popular art.”¹¹ In the case of music in the United States, Lopes argues that this movement was led by elite members of American society who aimed “specifically to distance themselves from popular entertainment and the popular classes,” and developed a “high art” world through the establishment of symphony orchestras, grand operas, music societies, schools, and special journals.¹² The emergence of this new art world would widen the discursive gap between “good” music and the “corruptive” influence of popular music.

The early twentieth century was not only a time of transformation in the world of professional music making. It was also a time of great innovation in mediating technologies that significantly changed the ways music was disseminated to audiences, as Neil Leonard explains:

Before 1917 Americans heard jazz “live,” that is, played directly to them, in dance halls, saloons, barrel houses, brothels, lumber and turpentine camps, riverboats and at minstrel and vaudeville shows, carnivals, parades and funerals. After the war people still hear it “live,” but more and more it reached them “canned,” that is, through mechanical sound-reproducing devices: the player piano, the phonograph, the radio and the film sound track. Conceived at the end of the nineteenth century, these devices were developed and widely marketed in the first part of the twentieth century. They grew up with jazz and strongly influenced its diffusion and evolution.¹³

Various popular music scholars have argued that postwar rock ‘n’ roll and rock—as opposed to earlier popular music genres—were defined in part by a new kind of relationship with recording technology. Reebee Garofalo, for instance, has claimed that “rock ‘n’ roll differed from previous forms of music in that records were its initial medium … [recording] technology exists as an element of the music itself.”¹⁴ Meanwhile, Theodore Gracyk viewed recordings to be a key component of the rock aesthetic, with the genre’s major musical developments always having “occurred in recording studios, as in the cases of Presley, Dylan, and the Beatles.”¹⁵ David Brackett argues that the roots of this transition predate rock ‘n’ roll; instead, he uses the term “sonic aesthetic” to describe a period in the early 1940s in which trade papers recognized the importance of coin-operated jukeboxes as a way of measuring the popularity of music, leading to “an emerging discourse [that] tentatively recognized recordings as texts”:

This sonic aesthetic, based on the unique qualities of sound associated with particular performers and performances, could only circulate beyond a specific performance space on radio broadcasts or mechanically reproducible recordings—sheet music could not communicate subtle timbral differences, let alone the microrhythmic nuances responsible for different grooves (easily felt by dancers but elusive for transcribers), or the pitch inflections that enliven melodies with otherwise limited pitch content (easily hummed along with by well-trained listeners but not amenable to even-tempered notation).¹⁶

Interestingly, however, jazz scholars have also made similar arguments, but trace the roots of this important shift even further back in history to the first decades of the twentieth century. Scott DeVeaux argues, for instance, that the development of recording technology caused a transformation in musical aesthetics which allowed the performer to be prioritized as an artist instead of the composer, and that it was jazz (as opposed to rock, rock ‘n’ roll, or jukebox era music) that first demonstrated the change:

With the widespread introduction of recording technology into the popular market in the first decades of the twentieth century, music sound itself became a tangible object. In the process, the nuances of performance—which included African-American techniques of timbral variation, pitch bending, and swing as well as European rubato and expressive phrasing—could finally be made permanent. This had the potential to greatly expand the reach and prestige of the performer. In particular, recordings made possible the rise of the improvising jazz soloist, whose powers of on-the-spot creation are so compelling that the copyrighted music nominally performed seems to recede into irrelevance. As Evan Eisenberg has argued, “records not only disseminated jazz, but inseminated it … in some ways they created what we now call jazz.”¹⁷

Although scholars point to different historical moments when discussing the changing dynamic between notation, live, and record-oriented music cultures, as early as 1921 phonograph records had become a significant way for Americans to listen to music. Leonard claims in that year alone “over 100 million records were manufactured, and Americans spent more money for them than for any other form of recreation.”¹⁸ However, the nascent record industry quickly faced intense competition from the rise of the radio, and with the sound quality of live radio broadcasts exceeding the quality of acoustic recording technology during that time, the two industries fought fiercely for consumers rather than complementing one another as they would later in the century. Despite their rivalry records and radio both began to change the way (not least the speed) in which music spread across the nation. Those aspiring musicians who were lucky enough to have access to recordings were able to teach themselves aspects of jazz performance by imitating the records of their favorite players, permitting them “to learn music without bothering with the formalism, discipline, technique and expense of traditional training.”¹⁹ In this way, the “Jazz Age” of the 1920s gave rise to certain foundational characteristics of a musical youth culture that are normally argued to appear only in much later musical cultures such as rock ‘n’ roll. As Burton Peretti notes, “jazz inspired adolescent white males to create cliques of appreciation and instrument playing, which led many of them to musical careers. Phonograph records and instrument instruction inspired high school boys … to form bands.”²⁰ These “cliques of appreciation” included record-collecting clubs, where young men gathered and argued with passion over the merits of hot jazz recordings. John Gennari documents how record-collecting clubs became a popular phenomenon across the United States by the mid-1930s, although several jazz fans who grew up in the 1920s, such as Marshall Stearns (who would become one of the most important early academic historians of jazz), remembered similar listening gatherings from their adolescent years as early as the 1920s.²¹ Finally, I would suggest that any such shift away from a “song-as-text” paradigm oriented around sheet music toward a “sonic aesthetic” (to use Brackett’s term) oriented around specific performances was already a part of live music culture. Jazz fans did not seek out hot jazz, live or recorded, because the songs were different, but because hot jazz bands transformed songs through distinctive performances (it should be remembered, for instance, that radio stations frequently broadcast live performances rather than recordings in the first half of the twentieth century and were just as able to transmit a sonic aesthetic as recordings).

It was not just young men for whom jazz was a crucial part of their social world. Chris McDonald notes that women also shaped their identities through their ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Raucous Jazz (Rock Is Jazz?)
• 1. Jazz Culture as a Precursor to Rock ‘n’ Roll Culture
• 2. The Dismissal of Rock ‘n’ Roll by Jazz Critics at Down Beat
• 3. The American Jazz Press Covers Rock
• 4. The Birth of Rolling Stone
• 5. Newport 1969 and the Uneasy Coupling of Jazz and Rock
• Conclusion: The Production of History
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint