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BOOK REVIEW
Allen Lowe
That Devilin' Tune : A Jazz History, 1900-1950
(Music and Arts Programs of America)
by Joe Milazzo
January 2002
In 1958, Sonny Rollins wrote this about his Riverside recording Freedom
Suite:
"America is deeply rooted in Negro culture: its colloquialisms,
its humor, its music. How ironic that the Negro, who more than any
other people can claim America's culture as his own, is being persecuted
and repressed, that the Negro, who has exemplified the humanities
in his very existence, is being rewarded with inhumanity."
Diction aside, in a mere two sentences, Rollins expresses the central
tenets of what was come to pass—and what we've become accustomed
to as—jazz criticism in the past 40 some-odd years. Perhaps Ken
Burns was right when he diagnosed jazz intellectuals with chronic
inability to arrive at civil consensus on even the most trivial musical
facts. But Burns mistook the symptom for the disease, and missed completely
that jazz criticism still suffers from a hereditary weakness, a lack
of collegial trust that stems from perceptions of race and power.
Whether Sonny Rollins, since typecast as modern jazz's most lasting
enigma, ever envisioned or currently approves of the racialist ideologies
of Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch is something which we will perhaps
never know. But Rollins' statement, like so many of profound cast,
presents truth and obfuscation in equal measure. It's up to us to
separate them, to see what justice time has meted out to them, and
to peel back the layers of paraphrase and misinterpretation that now
cling to these ideas.
When this reviewer first read on page 13 of tenor saxophonist, arranger,
composer and scholar Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune: A Jazz History,
1900-1950, about the "deep African and African-American roots
of all [emphasis mine] American culture", a tiny bit of
despair entered into the reading experience. But what quickly becomes
obvious over the course of the next 250 pages or so is that Lowe is
perhaps the most rational writer to attempt a project of this subject
and scope. Take, for example, just these few sentences on Thelonious
Monk's career:
"Who was Thelonious Monk? No one really seems to
know, though toward the end of his life (he died in 1982) the pianist
was revered as the last of jazz's great eccentrics and offered large
amounts of money (which he refused) to perform in public. The very
things which had once made his music so difficult and incomprehensible
to many—the odd melodic turns of phrase, the percussive primitiveness
of his touch, the unresolved dissonances, and, most of all, his
reputation for inscrutable eccentricity—were now, in a more
modern and tolerant age, the stuff of marketer's dreams... From
his earliest days as a professional musician Thelonious Monk had
gone his own way... Though his stance—his absolute refusal
to do anything but play his music in his own way, without compromise—was
seen by many as heroic, it was more likely the only choice he had.
In truth, Monk had a kind of artistic tunnel vision, something which
was to his and jazz's benefit, though he was lucky to have a built-in
support system—his wife and, later, record companies, promoters,
and booking agents—that allowed him the luxury of such a principled
life." (193)
The personal, the political, the musical—there it all is in a
package that is not so tidy as to be smug, but tight enough to withstand
the jostlings and pryings of dissent and rebuttal. Incorporating historical
investigation (sometimes impertinent, but most questions are), discographical
detective work, personal interviews, and, most crucially, often pithy
and memorable musical analysis—such as his likening of Frankie
Trumbauer's C-melody saxophone playing to "a painter using only
straight brush strokes" (112)—Lowe combines the best features
of the musicological and (often "amateur" or "enthusiast",
as Terry Treachout defined in an essay from last year's Nation)
jazz critical traditions.
Perhaps the most notable aspect of this book is that Lowe returns
to the notion that jazz is a popular music, with all the wonderfully
fascinating and difficult complexities that entails. His consideration
of the music's growth and transformation during the first half of
the 20th Century yanks jazz out of its isolation as "art music",
an aesthetic phenomenon only, without confusing the music's socio-historical
context for its actual and sole meaning. Citing Richard Gilman, Lowe
views "artistic creation... [as a] counter-history, the generation
of a psychological and aesthetic alternative to the prevailing artistic
and social order". (176)
Yes, this book could be five times its current length, and it sometimes
moves too swiftly, especially when one is not all that familiar with
the recordings under discussion. But That Devilin' Tune is
criticism of the best sort. It does not evaluate, rank, or taxonomize—it
elucidates and makes relevant to the way we perceive the totality
of the music, the way we recreate these sounds in our own imaginations.
It is a perhaps the first real jazz morphology; in That Devilin'
Tune, jazz is a musical attitude, a loose alliance of very different
kinds of information, that manages to cohere and flow through any
available circuit, and across any geographical and anthropological
borders:
"We've discussed in earlier chapters... issues of
musical black and white, acknowledging jazz's roots in the techniques
and experiences of 19th century black America. That truth notwithstanding,
jazz could not long be contained in one community, so strong were
its powers of musical persuasion, and so tempting and attractive
were its expressive elements—as a matter of fact, an argument
can easily be made that jazz's racial and multinational proliferation
was a tribute to the genius of its African American inventors. They
had devised cultural and musical strategies that were so irresistibly
populist and ingeniously community-based, while still amounting
to great art, that jazz itself held, in the very essences of its
aesthetic and mass appeal, the key to its racial and commercial
dispersal, to those very things which would aid and abet its separation
and ultimate flight from the African American community." (147)
Aside from it's dramatic irony, this thesis points toward Lowe's other
major achievement in That Devilin' Tune. Suppose we do as he
has done, and we consider early jazz vocalist Annette Hanshaw, 1920's
cornetist Thomas Morris, swing-era saxophonist Rudy Williams, and
European band leaders Ray Noble and Spike Hughes? Or, as Lowe himself
writes:
"And then there are those groups and musicians whose
impact and visibility is like that of a hit and run driver, who
are here one day and, though sometimes traceable by label (rather
than plate) number, nearly gone the next, having vanished into the
fog of the jazz and dance band's world of economic uncertainty."
(106)
The image, for this reviewer, immediately recall the Joe / Josephine
and Jerry / Daphne of Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, musicians
in dresses and heels madly scrabbling across boundaries not in self-conscious
violations of taboo, but in search of some safe haven (and maybe a
little fun). One of the most often-repeated tenets of early jazz research
is the fact that we know so little. We have tall tales about Buddy
Bolden, first-hand accounts of the brothels of New Orleans and we
know that the Gennett studios were almost literally on the wrong side
of the tracks, etc. But Lowe exposes this assumed paucity of knowledge
for the canard it is. Throughout That Devilin' Tune, Lowe reminds
us that, if we just open up the established canon of jazz recordings
even the slightest bit—if we deign to turn critical attention
to the likes of Wilbur Sweatman, Guy Lombardo, Raymond Scott, and
Hank Garland—it comes to light that we know more than we expected
we did. Recordings, for all their flaws (and early recordings may
not be so much flawed per se as much as they are a different form
of expression altogether) are the most important documentary resource
we have. Working from these assumptions, Lowe is also able to devote
much needed attention to musical styles that, existent—and in
some cases, still evolving—parallel to jazz as it's canonically
defined, both drew from and contributed to the music's vocabulary:
The rural blues, minstrelsy, and Western Swing. Some may argue that
his hunting for hints of jazz in the acetate dross of the early 20th
Century is an attempt to pollute the music with allegations of influence
that run counter to "the facts". But, consider, as Lowe
does, the impact of the recording as a technology:
"Jazz and its categorical offshoot popular blues
still largely emanated from the African-American community, but
as soon as the music reached shellac and national distribution any
proprietary ideas of ownership had to be abandoned." (73)
Doubtless it is no accident that That Devilin' Tune's final
paragraph is dedicated to a quick, "coming attractions"
appreciation of Sonny Rollins"[i]n everything he played there
was a sense of a work in progress, of structures built to last yet
still unfinished". (258) This very thing is what Sonny Rollins
was trying to communicate to us in 1958; the punning overtones and
sorrowful, indicting inflections that surround the words "humor",
"people", "humanities" and "inhumanity"
as Rollins employs them in his little annotation to Freedom Suite
still ring clear and harsh today. Like any good jazz player, Lowe
has the ear to hear it, and to know that, in many ways, the attempted
remedies have been worse than the affliction itself. At times cauterizing,
That Devilin' Tune cannot help but heal without hurting. With
Lowe currently at work on a companion volume that brings us through
the 1950's, another period that saw "white" and "black"
forms of jazz sharply defined in the critical and popular imagination,
we will see if his cure takes.
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