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Much of the recent scholarship on
modernism and modernity focuses on literature and visual media,[1] but it is just as true that "[t]he
twentieth century was built for the ear." To understand the transformation
from an agrarian to an urban society, from a natural to industrial workplace,
from acoustic to electric instruments, from live performance to mechanical
reproduction, we must explore how people negotiated what art historians call
the "machine aesthetics" of industrial society. One essayist recently
suggested we "plug in the headphones and listen—to cable cars ... Jupiter
rockets, surgical banter, steam locomotives, punch clocks: the work songs of
the whole carbon-based enterprise." The enormous aural adaptation
required of the human system has only recently engaged scholars—perhaps because
"sonic memories are at once more primal than visual ones ... and more
evanescent."[2]
The historian of science Emily
Thompson calls the new sonic barrage of the early twentieth century "the
soundscape of modernity," and shows the "dramatic
transformation" in the urban aural experience between 1900-1933. In 1896,
the noises of the cities werestill agrarian and natural: horse-drawn vehicles,
animals, churchbells, peddlers. In 1929, the top ten most unpleasant noises for
urbanites were "machine-age inventions," according to a comprehensive
report compiled by the Noise Abatement Commission of NewYork: trucks, car
horns, trolley cars, pneumatic drills, riveters, and radios (in stores and
homes). Nearly two-thirds of residents' specific complaints fit under three
categories: traffic, transportation, radios. "The air belongs to the
steady air of themotor," declared a writer in a 1925 essay entitled
"Noise." The musicologist John Blacking has famously defined music as
"humanly-organized sound"; in this essay I will show why jazz
musicians must be considered the artistic innovators who organized the noise of
machine-age civilization into artistic form.[3]
Industrial sounds, rhythms, and
systems represent a significant social and cultural revolution in daily life in
the industrial period (1865-1939). I will focus primarily on the machine
aesthetics in swing music and dance but a specifically African-American inquiry
into technological society can be said to have begun with the collective
creation of "The Ballad of John Henry” in the 1880s.[4] "Technological" here refers
not only to industrial innovations and mechanical rhythms, but also to the
on-going changes in human perception brought on by the experience of modernity.[5] Much of African-American musical
practice before 1945 can be said to have been created for the dancehall with
the intent to provide these social functions: (1) social bonding through music
and dance, (2) an opportunity to create an individual style within a collective
form, and (3) a dense rhythmic wave that imparts "participatory consciousness"
for the audience. All three combine to a set of practices musicologist Charles
Keil simply calls "grooving."[6] A generation before the development of a
musical vocabulary for instruments that were themselves machines (i.e.,
electric guitars and basses)—and a generation before musique concrète—jazz
musicians had tamed the industrial soundscape into a drive-train for a national
dance pulse.
Yet historians of technology assume a
mostly European canon of machine-age modernist art: the manifestos of the Italian
futurists; the paintings and sculpture of artists like Francis Picabia and
Marcel Duchamp; Bauhaus and International Style architecture, as practiced by
Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe; the paintings of Ferdinand
Leger and the Russian constructivists; the American Precisionist school of
painting (e.g., Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth); the films and novels that
project fears of overmechanization (Metropolis, Modern Times, Brave
New World).[7] Yet European machine-age modernists were
artistically motivated more by machine worship and modernist rebellion than
aesthetic integration and continuity. The Italian Futurists were "obsessed
with breaking away from the past," and envisioned the future as a powerful
automobile speeding away from European artistic traditions and social
conventions.[8] Architects Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier
dreamed of mass producing houses as Henry Ford produced cars, and the latter
referred to himself as an "industrialist" in 1920. French modernist
painter Francis Picabia saw in the machine "a model for his own
behavior," and famously sketched individual Americans as machines
(e.g., his "Portrait of a Nude American Woman" is a spark plug). For
these artists, machine aesthetics were embraced as new social values, and
"[t]echnology involved a commitment to such values as order, precision,
power, motion, and change."[9]
The unifying aesthetic principle of
machine-age modernism was "flow," or rhythmic flow. Art historian
Terry Smith has analyzed the process by which painters and photographers
rendered machine aesthetics beautiful to the eye, and dance scholar Hillel
Schwartz has shown how machines influenced the emergence of a new
"twentieth century kinesthetic" in dance. Whether in Taylorist motion
studies or motion pictures, in the assembly-line or automatic phonographs, in
the ideals of modern dancers or the graceful, banked curves of an airplane in
flight—these scholars perceive a quest for continuous, efficient, flowing,
forward motion. "In each case, one sought a natural, fluid transition from
step to step, frame to frame, task to task, bar to bar," Schwartz
observes. By 1930, for example, modern dancers and progressive educators
dismissed the staccato motion of nineteenth century physical training methods
such as gymnastics and ballet as "antique, highly technical" and too
"mechanically systematic"; they were forms that "promot[ed] not
autonomy, but automata."[10]
The model for industrial flow in the
early twentieth century was the assembly line, which was the centerpiece of the
enormouslypopular tours of the Ford River Rouge industrial plant in the 1920s.
Before the assembly line, mechanics worked in teams around a workbench. Then
between 1908 and 1913, Ford's production engineers and senior mechanics
realized that if you placed benches end to end and ran a conveyor belt across
them, you could create a more uniform pace for workers: it would speed up the
slow workers and slow down the fast ones. Imagine setting up dozens of
workbenches end to end, replacing the table-tops with a moving conveyor belt,
and lining up the workers alongside, and you have the perpetual motion of the
assembly line. The same ideal of rhythmic flow was already present in motion
pictures, and Smith sees the assembly line as itself cinematic: workers are
framed in a single, specialized job and then sequenced, just as individual
photographic frames become motion pictures. In 1913, a writer from American
Machinist began his description of the assembly of Model Ts with the
disclaimer that it could only be rendered accurately "with a modern
moving-picture machine."[11]
In a similar quest for rhythmic
flow, Bauhaus architects and the creators of streamlined design eliminated all
ornament from their work to emulate the clean, straight lines and flowing
masses familiar to functional engineering forms, like grain elevators, ocean
liners andthe steel skeleton construction of Chicago-school skyscrapers.[12] Gone were the gingerbread bric-a-brac of
the Victorian aesthetic, the exposed industrial workings of the machines from
the "gear-and-girder" era, or the regal, brick-solid symmetry of
beaux-arts architecture. Machine-age modernist photographers and painters then
"aestheticized" the machine by "stilling [its] motion... excluding
the human, implying an autonomy to the mechanical, then seeking a beauty of
repetition, simplicity, regularity of rhythm, clarity of surface."[13] For example, in his influential
paintings Classic Landscape (1930) and American Landscape (1931),
Charles Sheeler represented the centralized power of mass production of Ford's
River Rouge plant through precise, controlled, flat renderings of smoke stacks,
steel pipes, trains, and even mounds of industrial slag. In displaying the new
mechanical order, both Sheeler and fellow painter Charles Demuth nearly always
"omitted people from their technological landscapes."[14]
Was there any way for human beings
to participate in these new technological landscapes? Only Diego
Rivera's murals and Lewis Hine’s photographs integrated human beings into
artistic visions of industrial society in this period. In Rivera’s immense
murals of the assembly line at River Rouge, the workers are individuated (many
were the artist's friends), rendered with dignity, clothed in distinct styles,
and shown cooperating within the bowels of the great industrial machine. The
central mural on the South Wall features an enormous stamp press producing
fenders out of long sheets of steel while workers attach cylinder head covers
and other parts to the engine block. Produced in 1931 at the new Detroit
Institute of Fine Arts, Rivera interweaved machines and workers as if they were
the intestines of a freshly-minted Meso-American body politic reigned over by
Aztec gods who—like foremen—supervised the unification of the four races
(white, black, red, yellow) in the same way industrial processes turned raw
materials into mass produced goods. In envisioning a productive synergy of the
natural and mechanical orders, and a perceived unification of the
"North" with the "South," Rivera’s was a rare optimistic
vision of New World humanity in the Depression built around what he called
"the collective hero, man-and-machine."[15] Less cosmically, Lewis Hine’s acclaimed
photographs of the Empire State Building’s construction workers suggested human
beings at home in the immaterial ether. Sitting on girders suspended in space,
the workers entrance us with visions of skyscraper castles in the air. The
workers converse, eat lunch and weld steel at altitudes most people are still
thrilled simply to look out from.
Rivera and Hine provide visions of men at
work, not at play or in creative engagement with the new technological regime.
Butmen, women and children participated in technological landscapes in riding
trains, trolleys and cars, and in using such common devices as sewing machines
and telephones. As Thorstein Veblen theorized at the turn of the twentieth
century, by their work as"attendants" of machines, Americans by
necessity adapted to machine imperatives.[16] For example, in The Octopus
(1901), Frank Norris describes the jolt of machines to thehuman frame, implying
that any California farmhand running a thresher sat at the threshold of a new
human-machine interface. “Underneath him was the jarring, jolting, trembling
machine; not a clod was turned ... that he did not receive the swift impression
of it through his body, the very friction of the damp soil, sliding incessantly
from the shiny surface of the shears, seemed to reproduce itself in his
finger-tips and along the back of his head.”[17] Not through art or deep play, not
through choice or volition, but through the workplace and the industrial city
people learned (and had to learn) to adapt minds and bodies to machines.
A set of machine aesthetics evolved
simply because humans need to make sense—and beauty—of any environment.
Victorians found it difficult to conceive of machines as objects of artistic
beauty, and even exhibited triumphs such as the Corliss Engine or the Crystal
Palace were seen as feats of engineering. Observers may have felt what David
Nye has called the "technological sublime"—awe in the face of
unimaginable power—but neither artists nor writers had yet conceived of an
aesthetic vocabulary of stylization.[18] Machines were still associated with
materialism, dirt, capitalism, noise, and physical exertion. But in the
transformation of an agrarian society to an industrial one, and from natural
metaphor to mechanical metaphor, it was a matter of survival to aesthetically
organize noise, power, and repetition, and to adapt to the new demands upon the
human organism.
Thorstein Veblen first theorized
such an adjustment by workers to the rhythms, requirements and aesthetics of
factory work in his discussions of "the machine process" in The
Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) and The Instinct of Workmanship
(1914).[19] Veblen argued that people who worked
with machines adapted themselves to the pace and time of machines; they came
more and more to admire mechanical qualities and adjusted to the merits of mass
production. A worker was more a shepherd than an artisan; the machine was the
superior worker, the human being its assistant. "Perfection in the machine
technology is attained in the degree in which the given process can dispense
with manual labor; whereas perfection in the handicraft system means perfection
of manual workmanship... [The workman needs] to adapt his movements with
mechanical accuracy to its requirement."[20] Veblen did not at all question the
effect of factory work on individual human bodies, but his perception of such a
shift remains important.
Yet human work directed by a machine
threatened something essentially human and offended workers across class,
gender, ethnicity and epoch. The Lowell "factory girls" of the 1840s
despised the "ceaseless din" of the belts, wheels and springs in
constant motion; the skilled machinists of the 1890s loathed the stopwatch of
the Taylorist consultant; the striking General Motors workers of the 1930s
resented the tyranny of “the line.” Even the prosperous, unionized Cold War
assembly-line nine-to-fivers who enjoyed the lifestyle made possible by
well-paid factory work always complained of working at “the machine’s
pace."[21] Such dissatisfaction peaked in the
Depression as the economic reality of what was then called "technological
unemployment" dimmed the national pride in technological progress.
Early industrial researchers into "the human
motor" (as it was called in the nineteenth century) or "the human
machine" (as many doctors referred to the body) cared little about their
workers’ lives and studied only how to maximize productivity over a
ten-to-twelve-hour shift.[22] Businessmen were only concerned with how
to get the most of the human machine, or of the factory "hand." (In
the revealing trope of the hand, the body part is both reduced to a
mechanical aid and becomes a metonym for the whole human being.) Two crucial
philosophical questions were never raised by these nineteenth century
professionals: (1) How can a human being reclaim his or her human motor
from workplace demands?; (2) How can a person integrate the newly revved-up
machine-driven human motor into the entire human organism? In looking back at
the obsession with speed at the turn of the twentieth century, James Gleick
astutely perceived the subtext: "Why not change the speed of the human
machine as well?"[23]
In 1929, the prominent American
technological analyst Stuart Chase first began to see and hear machine-age
modernism. In Men and Machines (1929), he identified the machine
aesthetics in modernity that cultural forms needed to reflect and contain:
"mass, size, speed, fleeting images, repetition, sharpness of line; oral
experiences of the staccato, precise timing, and rhythm of completed operation."
These then are machine aesthetics: power, speed, repetition,
precision, efficiency, rhythmic flow. Chase quoted an
American art critic who found "the interaction of the machine on art"
in forms such as cubism, futurism, streamlining, jazz, skyscraper bookcases,
"modern plane and angle furniture, and new color combinations in
factories." These remain the basic forms: Futurist and Cubist painting,
jazz, streamlined design, the skyscraper, Bauhaus architecture and planar
furniture. Chase was still tentative about these forms but admitted that
skyscrapers, photography, motion pictures, automobile design, airplanes, and
mass-produced goods suggested some hope for "art … in the Power Age."[24]
Swinging
the Machine
In 1938, columnist Damon Runyon wrote
that swing music's dynamic noise echoed "the sounds of the machine
shop," and that this "violent" strain in the music was an
important element in its cross-generational popularity. Runyon didn't like
swing but had to admit it was "the most tremendous vogue of any style,
form or system of noise-making in the history of the USA." American youth
were "lunatics on swing music.... [and] old folks, too, are pretty much
swing-minded." Like many other observers, Runyon was shocked to find that
swing bands outdrew the movies at urban cinema palaces, and that young swing
fans hooted for the movie to end. After watching a Mae West movie lose out to
"the huffle-scuffle of Mr. Goodman's following," Runyon quipped that
it was the first time "Miss West ever ran second to a slide
trombone."[25]
Benny Goodman, the so-called
"King of Swing," recalled the crucial aesthetics of the first wave of
swing popularity: "the essence of swing was drive and power." What
Runyon called "the sounds of the machine shop," Benny Goodman called
"high-pressure powerhouse thumpings." The new swing-era rhythm
section "hammered out" the "power of swing," and chased the
"sweet music" of the early Depression away; the band "pounded
away at the audience" using massed sections of instruments and
"jungle-style drums." The music was made more exciting by its
unpredictability, by "the sound of surprise," and "the
excitement of improvisation transmit[ted] itself to the audience with the
certainty of an electric spark." What Damon Runyon called the swing
"vogue," Goodman called "the swing gospel."[26]
Otis Ferguson, the jazz critic of the New Republic, also
caught the interplay between big bands, human bodies, and machines. Upon
leaving a Benny Goodman show in New York in December 1936, Ferguson recalled
that he could still hear the music "ringing under the low sky" and
pulsating beneath his feet, "as if it came from the American ground under
these buildings, roads, and motorcars (which it did)." The Goodman band
created a "clangor in the ears" that pumped "the air ... full of
brass and of rhythms you can almost lean on" (or dance with). Veteran
swing bassist Gene Ramey riffed on the big band machine this way: "No
[big] band was great unless it had a strong rhythm section. It had to have a
motor."[27]
"Swing is the tempo of our
time," a New York Times declared enthusiastically in 1938, and the
nation's third controversy on jazz was engaged.[28] Was the music a healthy, vigorous outlet
or a "manifestation of ... restless hysteria"? If everyone agreed
that swing was "a reflection of the American emotional state," did
that indicate a healthy exuberance and energetic optimism?[29] Or were Americans irrationally drawn to
repetitive sounds and mechanical dances, motor behavior that suggested
trance-like behavior and indicated passivity? Or did swing represent the exact
opposite, "a protest against mechanization," as one
psychologist claimed, a release from the drab monotony of the machine
age?"[30] The answer can only be yes.
Big band swing was a synthesis of the two
dominant jazz forms of the 1920s: the rhythmic drive of New Orleans music and
the "symphonic jazz" espoused by Paul Whiteman's orchestras. Whiteman
muffled the pulse and surprise of New-Orleans-based syncopation to achieve a
grander symphonic vision that rhythmically retained only what was then called
the "businessman's bounce." Gilbert Seldes approved Whiteman's
achievement in 1924: "All the free, the instinctive, the wild in negro
jazz, which could be integrated into the music, he has kept; he has ...worked
his material until it runs sweetly in his dynamo, without grinding or scraping.
It becomes the machine which conceals the machinery."[31] Just as streamlined design hid the inner
workings of industrial machines, Whiteman's symphonic jazz hid the
self-expression and call and response of jazz in its muted horns, soft rhythms
and lack of improvisation. On the eve of Benny Goodman's triumphant Carnegie
Hall concert in 1938, the New York Times specifically delineated what
had been hidden to enable the rise of symphonic jazz to respectability:"It
had disowned and erased from its memory its forebears.... the darky workers on
the levees of the lower Mississippi, the hell-holes of New Orleans, the
riverboat bands... Memphis and the blues, the sawdust and smoke-beery air of
the Chicago joints."[32] As Seldes astutely perceived, it was a
slick artistic "machine which conceal[ed] the [creative] machinery."
The musicians of one of the best
Euro-American big bands of the 1920s, the Jean Goldkette band, were torn
between players who preferred the Whiteman style and those who "had a
looser [i.e., jazz] style." Arranger Bill Challis was on the
"jazz" side of the argument, and summed up the schism this way:
"You couldn't make the one [jazz] ... go over into their [Whiteman] type
of thing, which had been very, very successful." That is an
understatement: Whiteman had an amazing 169 hits between 1920 and 1930, yet
almost no hits after March of 1936. By mid-decade, symphonic jazz had lost its
hold on Depression-era Americans. Benny Goodman took the nation by storm with
brilliant soloists like Teddy Wilson, Harry James, Lionel Hampton (and himself)
all grounded in drummer Gene Krupa's "rock-solid foundation."[33]
New Orleans jazz guitarist Danny
Barker remembered the early 1930s as the moment small-unit jazz bands turned
into big band "machines." In the 1920s, in small-unit New-Orleans
jazz bands (like King Oliver’s band or Jelly Roll Morton’s Stompers), the
guitar players and banjo players participated as independent musical voices.
The banjoist or guitarist helped the drummer keep the rhythm, but also took as
many solos (or "breaks") as the clarinetists or cornetists in the
melodic front line. One day, Barker looked around and noticed that "all
the virtuoso guitar and banjo players weren't working”; they were "out
there scufflin'" or scraping by "working in dives."[34] The new guitar stars were rhythm
guitarists, like John Trueheart in Chick Webb's band, "who was the master
and boss of rhythm. Everybody remarked how great he was.... He was a master. He
would never take a solo, maybe a little break." In the newer, larger, big
bands, "[y]ou wouldn't be no virtuoso." The era of the rhythm
section had arrived, and the guitarist had become a rhythm provider, or, to
adapt African-American musicians' vernacular, a "foundation-maker."[35]
"You sat down with the bass player,
the piano player and the drummer," Barker remembered, "you got
together and you had a machine going there." The big bands of fourteen
or more musicians needed four instruments just to create enough strong, loud,
steady, stylized mechanical rhythm to provide percussive grounding for the horn
sections and keep them on-task. Fletcher Henderson's band featured guitarist
Clarence Holiday (Billie Holiday's father), who was "no virtuoso, but...
the pivot in the band; he was the solid foundation in the band." There was
Buddy Johnson in Harlem's Charlie Johnson's band, "who ... didn't have
much to say, [just] tended to business." The new integrated function of
the guitarist was to be one of the pistons providing engine-like power to drive
the big band train.[36]
New Orleans clarinetist Sidney
Bechet perceived the same set of changes less favorably. Big bands had turned
his beloved New Orleans music into a flashy machine whose arranged power
mattered more than the creativity and improvisation of the individual
musicians. To Bechet, bandleaders sold their personalities rather than the
music, and arrangements moved jazz towards a written-score-centered set of
musical practices. "They've got themselves a kind of machine. And so to
make sense out of whatever it is the machine is doing, they get a whole lot of
composers and arrangers to write it all down, just the way the machine is
supposed to run." Gone was the conversation of one musician to another of
the small New Orleans units, "all that freedom, all that feeling a man's
got when he's playing next to you." Bechet compared big band arrangements
to "running a ball through a pinball machine"; with fourteen to
eighteen men, "you've got a whole lot of noise." For Bechet, the big
band sound removed the Black historical experience from the music. "Those
new musicianers, they lack the memory of it."[37]
It is significant that, according to
Barker and Bechet, big band swing was not New Orleans music. I am
suggesting here that swing musicians were in dialogue with the cultural desires
of the entire nation. The new musical role of the guitarist, for example, had
social and cultural ramifications. "I found out that you keep appearance
and watch the clock and be on time," Barker remembered about big band
success. "You had to be competent and you had not to be an obnoxious
character." Musicians admired Clarence Holiday as much for his cool,
urbane style as his guitar work: "He was immaculate... and neat and cool."
Neither Holiday nor Johnson nor Trueheart had "much to say" on their
guitars—i.e., they did not solo much—but they played crisp, immaculate four
quarter notes to the bar in 4/4 rhythm, and kept big bands on track.[38]
Despite big-band swing's enormous
popularity, there is little cultural analysis on why bands nearly
doubled in size (from an average of eight to an average of sixteen), why the
section superseded the soloist in importance, why the groove was smoothed out.
"[S]wing music was the answer for the American—and very human—love of
bigness," Marshall Stearns theorized in 1955. Thirty years later, James
Lincoln Collier added only that "it was a time when leaders and fans liked
a lot of power."[39] Why bigness? Why power? Because the
tempo of life was increasing as mechanicalrhythms pervaded the workplace and
urban environments. It seems logical Americans would choose music—"the
temporal art par excellence"[40]—as the art form to negotiate the shift
from a natural/agrarian environment to an industrial/mechanical one.
There were two major structural
changes from small-unit jazz to big-band swing: first, the different massed
sections (trumpets, trombones, saxophones) "talked" back and forth,
building up rhythmic tension only to release it; second, the rhythmic
underpinning became much more sophisticated.[41] As arrangers, Don Redman and Fletcher
Henderson perfected the call and response of the sections by the late 1920s,
but smoothing out the rhythmic groove took about six years (approximately
1928-1934). There were three main elements: string basses replaced tubas; guitars
replaced banjos; drummers like Jo Jones transferred the time-keeping from the
heavy, thudding bass drum to the light, shimmering high-hat cymbal.[42] By the time this groove revolution was
complete, one jazz scholar could compare dancing to Count Basie's rhythm
section with "riding on ball bearings."[43]
One veteran trumpeter of the early
1920s defined "swing tempo" as "feeling an increase in
tempo though you're still playing at the same tempo." A jazz critic of the
time defined swing as "an exhilarating rhythmic feeling created around a
fundamental pulse that suggests—but does not actually realize—a quickening of
tempo."[44] In other words, swing tempo is
deceptively fast, a musical illusion produced by playing what jazz musicians
call "on top of the beat," as if pushing the music forward. It was
also called "the push beat" or the "kick-your-ass beat";
Albert Murray calls the "velocity of celebration."[45] This illusion was provided by a
resilient, flexible rhythm section playing four even beats to the bar, freeing
soloists to soar away from the ground beat; the jerky two-beat syncopation of
the 1920s dissolved into "a more flowing, streamlined four-beat
rhythm."[46]
Big band swing was also the fastest
popular dance music in American history. This is observable through the
dance-beat measurement of beats per minute (bpm). March tempo is 120 bpm;
ragtime also hovers around this rate, two beats per second. A fast rock'n'roll
song might be taken slightly faster, at 140 bpm. The "bpm"
measurement was created in order that club DJs in '70s discos could create
seamless dance grooves; but disco rarely surpassed 140 bpm. Yet there were
dozens of swing tunes above 200 bpm—an amazingly fast tempo—and Chick Webb's
"Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie" (1936) clocked in at 260 bpm.[47] Two new terms were coined by musicians
for these super-fast songs: "flag-wavers" and
"killer-dillers."[48] Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom became a
must-see tourist stop in the 1930s in part because Euro-Americans wanted to see
how African-American lindy hoppers danced gracefully to such fast music.
As for precision, the instrumental
sections reflected gear and piston efficiency. The "section" was the
key distinctive structural innovation of big-band swing, and a musician had to
learn how to blend in without losing his or her own voice.[49] In big band swing, the average song was
only "25% solo" and "to 'swing the sections' was the most
important part."[50] For example, three trumpets wouldstand
up and play an ensemble passage and try to achieve a sonorous blend of tones.
Sections stood up to play in turn, like different parts of the machine kicking
into gear.[51] Each section was like a piston and any
section musician a part of that piston’s rhythmic drive. A major technical
advance of the average 1930s musician was in proficiency and precision.
Meanwhile, the arranger who scored the sections became one of the most
important members of the big band (and often the highest paid).[52]
The swing band was also a visual
icon: it was, in a sense, a machine built of humans. Swing bands embodied
dynamic order visually and musically: fourteen to eighteen men in identical
suits sat calmly in sections behind musical desks monogrammed with the company
name waiting to explode in a controlled fashion.[53] One fan recalled the excitement of
seeing the big band rise out of the orchestra pit as the movie ended at the
Paramount:
The stage lights burst aglow and out of
the pit rose this marvelous ark filled with 16-20 men, gleaming golden
instruments flashing in the spotlights... [T]he band was already pulsating with
life, the front sax section filling the hall with sweet notes, the brass
setting your ears afire... [drummers] flailing their snares, tom-toms and
cymbals, a row of trombonists executing precision drill.[54]
The
big band was a machine whose human "workings" were visible to all. It
was also a "machine" whose working "humans" often appeared
to enjoy their work. Musicians often claimed they were as thrilled to
hear Billie Holiday or Chick Webb or Benny Goodman every night as the
audiences—or that they looked forward to what the band would produce on any
given night.
The guitarist's new role was a
crucial element in swing's modern flow, and in its transition from New Orleans
jazz to big band swing. For example, Count Basie's rhythm section was
unanimously considered the nation's best (even by other musicians)—i.e., the
most fluid, powerful, stable, driving force—and was dubbed "the
All-American Rhythm Section." "Basie's rhythm section...was probably
the most brilliant percussion combination in jazz history," musicologist
Wilfrid Mellers reflected in Music In A New Found Land (1964), and
"Basie's music...accepts the consequences of a machine-made world."[55] Yet despite the innovative virtuosity of
drummer Jo Jones, bassist Walter Page and pianist Bill Basie, many band members
believed the foundation of the band was guitarist Freddie Green. Green
"holds things together," Basie admitted, and "kept time" in
a lean, efficient fashion. Green’s steadying role was as important as Jones'
more famous sizzling hi-hat symbol or Page's powerful walking bass.[56]
At a 1982 party, veteran bassist Red
Mitchell expressed hisrespect for Green for playing "the most swinging
quarter notes of anybody ever." He read this short ode to Green and his
swing beat:
It's sound and soul,
communication, love, support and bounce.
Green
responded that he "couldn't have said it better than that." When
Mitchell asked for advice, Green told him that no matter who is leading the
melody, "the bass player has to live, has to sort of sleep with the
groove, make love to it." To "make love" to a groove, mechanical
or otherwise, cannot be confused with assembly-line work, despite the common
qualities of repetitious motion. Such metaphors remain common among
contemporary rhythm section players.[57]
Repetition
and Musical Modernity
Where did the practice of
maintaining a functional, evolving, pulsating dance groove in American culture
originate? Tricia Rose suggests that the crucial difference between European-
and African-derived musics has been in their approach to "the
inevitability of repetition." To Europeans, rhythmic repetition was long
considered boring and static, in contrast to the goal of "harmonic
resolution" and linear melodic narrative. Yet to the Yoruba, for example,
repetition represents "stability and predictability," and in
drumming, can be experienced as "a steady, unbroken flow."
African-derived cultures perceive repetition as "circulation, [and]
equilibrium"; in Afrodiasporic musics, there is a constant return to the
original rhythm "with a signal difference"—that is, each time
something new is added to "the rhythmic and percussive density and
organization."[58] Maintaining a dense percussive layer for
the purpose of stability provides the conditions by which new rhythms and
sounds can be "mixed in" to African-derived musics. African-Americans
have managed to create unifying idioms that are recognized as "black"
music and dance, yet that continue to absorb other cultural influences and
develop aesthetically. As Rose asserts, "Rhythm and polyrhythmic layering
is to African and African-derived musics what harmony and the harmonic triad is
to Western classical music."
Logically then, certain stylistic
elements of West African dance also lend themselves to integrating new rhythms
and gestures, such as repetition, layering, and flow. While visiting West
Africa in 1934 for the first time, anthropologist Edward Gorer was stunned by
the speed, originality, and power of the dancing. West Africans "dance
with a verve, a precision, an ingenuity which no other race can show; the smallest
[village] group had its own ballet, distinct in costume, movement and
tempo." Watching an afternoon of dance among the Hausa and Pelk peoples,
Gorer recalled how one powerful dance of "frenzied rhythmic
precision" changed his biological tempo. "It affected me
physiologically... my heart beat faster with the mounting rhythm; I forgot my
watching body and seemed to dance with the dancers." An awe-struck Gorer
wrote that the dance "could only be judged by the highest standards of
choreography."[59]
Musicologist Charles Keil lived
among the Tiv peoples of West Africa, where he found that large-scale costume
dramas combining music, dance, text and drama were the primary form of culture.
Several original full-length "musicals" (so to speak) of social
commentary (and critique) were produced every year; groups practiced for six to
seven months before their first performance. The aesthetic values in Tiv dance
were speed, precision, power, fluidity and "smoothness." In their
rehearsals, Keil observed the painstaking effort expended "to achieve
perfect synchrony within the line and between the dancers and the
drummers." The dance groups "represent[ed] the highest degree of
organizational complexity to be found in Tiv society." Out of a total
population of one million Tiv, Keil identified between five hundred and one
thousand regular composers, more than two hundred full-time dance
organizations, and forty to sixty current dance styles. In this one small area
of Africa, Keil noted that every small town had its own distinct rhythms,
dances, and musical phrases—known to all the surrounding groups—and wondered at
the musical complexity of the African continent.[60]
For the Tiv, as for most Africans,
dance is the fundamental artistic expression. "[It] represents the most
positive, life-affirming forces and values in Tivland, a powerful collective
antidote to the negative or individualistic aspect of tsav [a Tiv term
for selfishness]." In 1979 Keil called upon scholars to try to understand
Tiv "musico-choreographic" expressive culture on its own terms.
"Why apply our spatial-visual-vertical-hierarchical-intellectual games
with [to] their temporal-aural-horizontal-egalitarian life energies?.... We
should be tapping their energies to ... criticize and revitalize, if possible,
our existence." In Tiv dance, the tensions of the individual and the group
are mediated; analogously (and not at all essentially), perhaps we might think
of African-American music and dance as criticizing and revitalizing American society
since the beginnings of jazz and blues.[61]
As with the Tiv, so with the Yoruba,
among whom repetition, improvisation, creativity, and artistic complexity are
also highly valued. Anthropologist Margaret Thompson Drewal connects West
African and African-American musical approaches through Gates's theory of
"signifying." "'To signify' is to revise that which is received,"
Drewal observes of Yoruba ritual, and "repetition with revision" is
one definition of the Yoruba concept of "ere," or "deep
play." "Ere" assumes an improvisational performance, "an
engaging participatory, transformational process" in which performers and
spectators invent scenarios in which they attempt "to disorient [others]
and be disoriented, to surprise and be surprised, to shock and be shocked, and
to laugh together—to enjoy." For example, "dancers and drummers…
negotiate rhythmically with each other, maintaining a competitive
interrelatedness." In the "ere" mode, one "test[s] the
stuff opponents are made of," and uses the "insight" gained in
this test of wits to apply "to any life situation."[62]
Drewal refers to Yoruba culture as
"modernism beyond modernism"—a set of approaches that assumes radical
shifts in tempo, complete audience participation, constant improvisation and
"vital alertness." Drewal connects this idea of aestheticsurprise
with the goal of modernist artists in the West. "Unfixed and unstable,
Yoruba ritual is more modern than modernism itself," she claims.[63] In working among the urban Yoruba,
anthropologist Christopher Waterman observes the same "modernist"
processes at work in "jùjú music," the most popular urban Yoruba
musical form from the 1960s through the 1980s. Waterman is fascinated by how
this musical idiom contains so much non-Yoruba material, yet manages to remain
recognizably Yoruban. In its overlapping rhythmic textures are found "deep
Yoruba praise singing and drumming, guitar techniques from soul music, Latin
American dance rhythms, church hymns, and country-and western melodies, pedal
steel guitar licks and Indian film music themes"—yet jùjú musicians still
"effectively evoke traditional values" for its audiences in Nigerian
cities. Waterman calls their aesthetic approach a "utilitarian syncretic
ideology." As one jùjú bandleader told him, "'You know, our Yoruba
tradition is really a modern tradition.'"[64]
The difference between West African
and African-American rhythmic approaches is that the former is conceived in
rhythmic sequences, and the latter from a steady pulse—due to the encounter
with European music. For example, the steady backbeat of early jazz and rock
and roll does not exist in traditional African music. Strong-beat and weak-beat
(on-beat/off-beat) notions are related to the "1 and 2 or 3 and 4 in
European music," notes a Nigerian scholar who has worked in the United
States, and "the African neither makes nor comprehends his music in terms
of numerical beats..... [but] in measured idiomatic phrases." African
music is more "an idiom—indeed, a language," and is
"syntactically conceptualized": rhythms are functional and
communicate translatable messages that the in-group can understand. It is
always "more than just the pulse in a rhythm," and more akin
to "a message as in speech."[65]
Scholars have suggested that the jazz drummer gradually took
on the role of three or four separate drummers in a West African drum ensemble.
In the process, however, the polyrhythmic quality of African music became
narrowed to a densely textured single rhythm: the inexhaustible 4/4 of
swing-time. The adjustment "to the white man's music consisted precisely
of translating these polymetric and polyrhythmic points of emphasis into the
monometric and monorhythmic structure of European music." Significantly,
the standard trap-set (snare, bass drum, tom-tom, hi-hat, cymbals) was developed
during the swing era and reflected the growing Africanization of American
popular music, as playing "trap drums is [like] being a traditional drum
ensemble all by yourself."[66]
Drums are considered both sacred and
alive in West African societies: rituals are built upon the foundations laid by
drums. According to master drummer Babatunde Olatunji, the combination of drum
and drummer creates a medium for cosmic forces due to the synergistic unity of
tree-spirit (the body of the drum), animal spirit (the skin) and human spirit
(the drummer). The result is "an irresistible force, a trinity, a balance
that gives the drum its healing power."[67] According to Grateful Dead drummer and
drum scholar Mickey Hart, the rhythmic power to heal emerges from playing
"a rhythmic cycle .... over and over" until there is "a
foundation you can build on. The stronger the groove the higher the building
you can erect."[68]
The quality of big-band swing that
creates the foundation of a dance-hall ritual of mind-body integration was
called just that by swing-era musicians: the "foundation" or
"foundation quality" of the music. "Foundation" is a
trope used by swing-era musicians to describe the ground on which any socially
engaged music is built. Many swing-era musicians discuss this "foundation
quality" as a palpable physical presence, as if sound waves actually built
a platform to walk on. Pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton claimed that the
crucial elements of jazz were accurate tempos, strong riffs, breaks in the
music (for solos) and a sense of open space. He defined a piano riff as
"what you would call the foundation, as like you would walk on." W.C.
Handy was more philosophical: "We [African-Americans] look for truth in
music... What we want in music is something to build on."[69] Stride pianist Willie "the
Lion" Smith claimed that ragtime pianists "had no left hand," a
reference to a renewed emphasis on strong bass rhythm after 1920. Duke
Ellington declared simply that any "Negro musician" in his time uses
"the black beat [as] his foundation" to reflect the social concerns
and aural environment.[70]
Significantly, the jazz rhythm
section—rhythm guitar, bass and drums—was created in the swing era, and
specifically between 1928 and 1934. Even the best 1920s jazz bands had "no
bottom," according to one of the decade's best arrangers, and the drummer
was simply considered a "time-keeper."[71] In these six years, the guitar replaced
the banjo, the string bass replaced the tuba, and drummers built the standard
trap set as we know it today, adding the high-hat, the tom-tom, cymbals and
wire brushes to increase their ability to create a lusher world of sound, to
support soloists with different rhythms, and most importantly, "to push
big bands around."[72]
The emergence of individual
identities for the string bass and the drummer, and of a new relationship
between the two, created the stronger rhythmic "foundation" of swing
music. "[T]he foundation ... is rhythm ... and this is between the bass
violin and the bass drum, between the two of them," recalled Hinton's
partner, Panama Francis. "[They] set the pulsation for people to pat their
feet and dance to."[73] Two influential swing-era bassists (Milt
Hinton and John Simmons) took up their instrument precisely because it had no
identity in jazz in the 1920s; they enjoyed the challenge of creating the sound
of their instrument. Often the bass, like the drums, functioned as a
noise-maker ora novelty instrument, "a personality [thing]... slapping the
bass, you know," recalled Cab Calloway's bassist, Milt Hinton,
"single slap, double slap, triple slap, spin the bass."[74]
In the swing era, a new rhythm foundation was built for American
popular music through instruments, relationships between players, and the sound
of the "beat" itself. Eddie Durham, arranger and guitarist with Count
Basie, described the change from tuba to bass. "Without amplification, a
lot of guys weren't strong enough on bass ... [b]ut Walter Page [the Basie
bassist] you could hear! He was like a house with a note."[75] As New Orleans drummer Baby Dodds put
it: "You can’t get into a locked house without a key, and the drum is the
key to the band."[76]
The
drummer's job was to uplift the band, so the band could then better together
uplift the audience. According to one swing drummer, his job was to "lift
that band, just lift it right off the floor and push it."[77] Jimmie Lunceford's
drummer, Jimmy Crawford, explained his role: "Lunceford [brought] ... his
stick down for the opening beat, but from then on the drummer had to control
the tempo, make the transitions, watch the music, the feet of the dancers, the
gestures of the singers, and everything.... [If] I didn't look at the dancers'
feet as well as the music, I couldn't make those transitions right."[78] Cozy Cole noted that a
drummer must get to know a musician in order to enhance his performance and
provide a dialogue with it: "I'm not going to play solo drums behind your
solo, but I'm going to feed you a certain foundation that will make you feel
good while you're playing."[79]
The
Italian Futurists recognized a rise in the noise level of industrial society
and a cultural hunger for more "noise" in music.[80] The fast-but-buoyant
swing tempos were developed in response to unarticulated needs of the American
dance public for sonic power in a time before electric instruments. The drummer
became a star instrumentalist, and drum solos were the highlights of many
shows. Gene Krupa was the charismatic teen idol of the Benny Goodman band (and
a drum guru for many); Chick Webb was the star, bandleader and emotional
flashpoint of the Savoy Ballroom's house band (which launched Ella Fitzgerald).
The biggest audience responses at Cab Calloway's energetic concerts were for
the drum-solo-based features of Cozy Cole, "Paradiddle" and
"Crescendo for Drums."[81]
In the late nineteenth century,
American audiences responded to drumming showmen in many areas of popular
culture: in circuses, carnivals and minstrel shows, in military parades and
brass marching bands, and as creators of sound effects from the orchestra pit
of silent movies.[82] Many swing drummers began at jobs like
these (like Jo Jones, Chick Webb and Sonny Greer), or apprenticed with such a
drummer.[83] However, in commercial bands, hotel
dance bands, and in the classical tradition, the drummer was still mostly a
timekeeper.[84] As drummers became the point-men for
producing smooth, flowing rhythms that offset—and evened out—the brassy power
of big bands, they began to take on roles akin to West African master drummers.
In West Africa, the master drummer must be a tempo leader, "ensemble conductor,"
philosopher, psychologist, "coordinator of dance and song," and the
point-man of spiritual uplift.[85]
In this short survey of West African
and African-American cultural practices, I have attempted to show some artistic
elements of music and dance (e.g., speed, power, repetition, flow) that provide
a background for African-American cultural encounters with "the
machine" (abstractly) and with machine aesthetics (concretely).
African-American
Popular Modernism
Pre-1945 jazz qualifies as
"modernist" art within European ideas of artistic innovation and
self-expression, but its artists created music with an entirely different
social and aesthetic agenda. African-American swing-era jazz modernists did not
consider themselves apart from their audiences, nor in defiance of bourgeois
taste or archaicartistic convention. Their goal, more often that not, was to
encourage a unifying spirit in a public dance-hall ritual more indebted to a
West African aesthetic than either a folk, classical or vaudeville tradition.
The artists' most rewarding moments came in-the-moment: when audiences of
average people responded with emotion, enthusiasm, and physical grace to their
art, it made them play harder and better for the temporary community created by
the dance-hall ritual. Like the goal of much West African ritual, the big-band
swing dance-hall ritual yokes seemingly opposite social demands together: in
this case, a rebellious modernist defiance in aesthetics combined with the unifying
act of social dance. As Brian Ward has pointed out, music is the cultural form
that mediates between oppositional and assimilationist trends for
African-Americans, between resistance and accommodation.[86]
African-American music is no longer
referred to as primitive, folk, or unconscious, yet even an astute scholar like
Martha Bayles refers to African-American musicians and dancers as
"culturally innocent" of "the attitudes and beliefs of
modernism." This is true only if we accept European ideas and ideals of
modernism. When Marshall Berman defines the experience of modernity as "a
life of paradox and contradiction," one that involves being dominated by
"immense bureaucratic organizations," to which modernists must
"be undeterred ... to fight to change"—how can African-Americans be
"culturally innocent" of such an experience? Berman admires Marx and
Dostoevski for speaking to the necessity of "embrac[ing] the modern world's
potentialities without loathing and fighting ... its most palpable
realities." For African-American artists, this was literally a life or
death act, both at an individual and cultural level.[87]
Swing music and dance is precisely
about this very modern tension, but African-American bandleaders consciously
attempted to communicate with a popular audience. Black musicians and
dancers created and performed within an aesthetic tradition they felt strongly
about honoring, not rebelling against. Thus, the cultural production and
artistic experimentation of what one might call African-American popular
modernism emerged from a non-European set of cultural practices and artistic
intentions.
Duke Ellington's artistic goal was
to establish two-way social and aesthetic communication with his audiences.
"[I]f a guy plays something and nobody digs it, then he hasn't
communicated with the audience. And either he goes somewhere to an audience
that does dig him, or else he adjusts what he's doing to the audience that he
has." This is not a modernist attitude but a culturally democratic one.
When Ellington wrote "improv" or "ad lib" on his scores for
trumpeter Cootie Williams or altoist Johnny Hodges to create their own solos,
he believed he worked in service to the musicians and audiences. From a Western
perspective that valorizes the individual artist, such cooperation makes him a
lesser composer; from an American perspective, such an approach seems
democratic and populist in striving to create functional music that mediates
tension between the individual and the group. "[T]he music of my race ...
[is] something which is going to live, something which posterity will honor in
a higher sense than merely that of the music of the ballroom today."[88]
In the same period, Louis Armstrong
similarly identified this artistic tension between individual style and popular
reception. In a short 1932 piece written to promote his London performances,
Armstrong declared that "the famous musicians and bands all have a style
of their own. I determined from the start to cultivate an original style, and …
I tried out all sorts of ideas, discarding some, practicing others, until I
reached, not perfection, since that is unattainable for the true musician, but
the best that was in me." Therein lies his artistry, but communication
results only if the audience resonates with that created style. “[T]he real
test is entertainment. Does it interest your audience? Of course, you can
gradually teach them to appreciate new styles and absorb new ideas, but it must
be gradual and they must have no idea that you are 'teaching.'"[89] The call-and-response of Afrodiasporic
music contains this performer-audience aspect: the artistic call must
earn the audience’s response, or else no "conversation" is
taking place.
Ralph Ellison best expressed this
innovating-traditionalist approach of swing-era jazz musicians. Ellison grew up
in Oklahoma City, the home-base of the influential territory band, the Oklahoma
City Blue Devils; he was also a close personal friend of Jimmy Rushing, the
band’s vocalist, and a regular at their performances and jam sessions. Anchored
by bassist Walter Page, trumpeter Oran "Hot Lips" Page, Rushing, and
tenor saxophonist Lester Young, the Blue Devils effectively merged with Bennie
Moten's band in Kansas City in the early 1930s to form the Count Basie band. I
must quote at length to honor the passion (and acute analysis) of Ellison's
homage to his own hometown heroes:
These jazzmen ... lived for and with
music intensely. Their driving motivation was neither money nor fame, but the
will to achieve the most eloquent expression of idea-emotions through
the technical mastery of their instruments (which ... some of them wore as a
priest wears the cross).... The delicate balance struck between strong
individual personality and the group during those early jam sessions was a
marvel of social organization.... [T]he end of all this discipline and
technical mastery was the desire to express an affirmative way of life through
its musical tradition and that this tradition insisted that each artist
achieve his creativity within its frame. He must learn the best of the past,
and add to it his personal vision. Life could be harsh, loud and wrong if
it wished, but they lived it fully, and when they expressed their attitude
toward the world it was with a fluid style that reduced the chaos of living
to form [my emphasis].[90]
If
that is not the point of artistic endeavor—and if experimentation with new
forms was not a modernist ideal—then these terms are meaningless. Gunther
Schuller adds that all black bands knew their limited "options for
professional survival,” and balanced artistic and aesthetic concerns with
"economic and social" ones. They knew that "a music which cannot
attain and then maintain an audience also cannot survive."[91]
Yet the first band to combine raw speed
and technical precision was the Euro-American Casa Loma Orchestra, and it was
also the only band Downbeat ever labeled as purveyors of "machine
jazz." The Casa Loma Orchestra came out of 1920s Detroit—the epicenter of
American mass production—and its sound reflected machine aesthetics: fast
tempos, precision execution, limited soloing, and a driving-but-stiff rhythm
section that produced a "steamroller" effect.[92] Arranger Gene Gifford was a Southerner
and trained draftsman whose scores required a high level of technical expertise
and exhaustive rehearsals; trombonist Billy Rausch intimidated the band members
into playing with "machine-like precision."[93] Black bands admired them: Fletcher
Henderson's Orchestra recorded their influential 1930 hit, "Casa Loma
Stomp"; Chick Webb's trombonist Sandy Williams admitted that besides
Ellington's band, only Casa Loma "really gave us a headache ... I hate to
say it, but they outplayed us."[94] Benny Goodman said they were "the
band we had started out to buck." They may have been mocked as embracing
"[s]oulless efficiency and ... military precision," but their stiff
mechanical rhythm was central to the band's aesthetic, to their college fans
and to musicians aspiring towards technical perfection in the early 1930s. The
repetitive mechanical rhythms organized the industrial soundscape. One
incarnation of Casa Loma was called "Glenn Gray and his Mechanical
Marionettes."[95]
But by 1937, the Casa Loma Orchestra
had shifted their emphasis to ballads. Downbeat pondered the change in
white musical taste in a 1936 cover story: "Casa Loma's music is not the
most relaxed swing ... but they are one of the most brilliant ensemble groups
that ever swung sixteen men in a single groove.... When did 5 brass or saxes
phrasing as one, beautifully voiced and perfectly executed, cease to be
[as] worthwhile as a solo man with a simple rhythm background?"[96] My guess would be the middle of 1935,
the period when Benny Goodman rose to fame, and that the key phrases here are
"solo man" and "simple rhythm background." It was as if
once humans could replicate machine aesthetics—noise, speed, precision,
efficiency, relentless drive—the need for human dynamics, and individual
self-expression, reasserted itself.
Duke Ellington disdained the
"soulless" quality and "continual churning" of certain
rhythm sections. Uninspired metronomic time-keeping caused "apathy in the
section[s]," he wrote in 1931, and a loss of interest among the musicians,
whose "performance becomes stodgy and mechanical." The most important
element in dance music was the groove generated by the rhythm section of bass,
drums, guitar, and piano: the pulse they generated kept the other musicians in
gear, and thusin touch with the dancing audience. The rhythm section drove
individual soloists, kept the ensembles loose-but-precise, and allowed a live
performance to embody the jazz ideal of "relaxed intensity." At the
end of Ellington's first theoretical discussion of music, he stated simply,
"Remember that your most important asset is your rhythm."[97] For African-American bands, to have
"good" rhythm suggested a stylization of the aesthetic element of
repetition, but it had nothing to do with being "perfect" or
"mechanically perfect."
Scholars have reclaimed rhythm as an
aesthetic force of cultural expertise and continuity within a long, venerable
tradition of music and dance. Rhythm re-energizes the body and creates the
conditions for participatory activity, kinesthetic lightness and grooving.
"[T]he power of the rhythm [surges] through the body, energizing and
vitalizing all its parts," musicologist Jon Michael Spencer explains.
"All other aspects are anchored by its solidity, stability, and
repetitiveness. It is not enough merely to hear the groove; you must be drawn
inside it, and it must penetrate to your inner core."[98] Against machine aesthetics, Americans of
all ethnicities appropriated a West African-derived cultural aesthetic. The
elements of such a specifically African-American cultural aesthetic as
articulated through music and dance practices have been analyzed by American
Studies scholar Gena Caponi-Tabery: (1) rhythmic and metric complexity; (2)
individual improvisation and stylization; (3) call and response; (4) active
engagement of the whole person and the whole community; (5) social commentary
or competition through indirection and satire; (6) development of a group
consciousness or sensibility.[99] And of course, rhythm remains the sine
qua non of American popular music, from ragtime to hip-hop.
"I got rhythm/ I got music/ I got
rhythm/ who could ask for anything more." Ethel Merman launched her career with this song, the
show-stopper of the 1930 Gershwin musical, Girl Crazy. But it was only
one of literally hundreds of songs between the wars that spoke of rhythm as a
kind of snake oil or magic elixir—in this case, a vital form of
nourishment—that would help Americans survive through participatory activity.[100] To repeat the chorus line of one of the
great jazz standards of the twentieth century: "I got rhythm—who could ask
for anything more?" Why was rhythm the élan vital itself? Because
rhythmic activities presume whole-body participation, body-centered motion,
hand-clapping, dancing, singing. One listens to symphonies; one dances to
rhythmically-driven music.
Architecture critic Herbert Muschamp
recently summed up the modernism of the "New York’s cityscape"as
beholden to an ideal of "[e]scaping gravity and heaviness without losing
touch with the ground"—as, for example, in the Brooklyn Bridge, the
Chrysler Building, and the Seagram Building.[101] But what of the human structure?
The regrounding of what Julia Foulkes calls "modern bodies"[102] came through the global impact of
African-American jazz dance. Against the fantasies of aviation and Eurocentric
verticality, African dance is earth-centered: one faces the ground, not the
heavens as in ballet; a dancer uses all parts of the body, not just armsand
legs; vigorous African shoulder and hip movements energize the body, and the
angular bending of knees and elbows symbolize engagement with everyday life.
What Barbara Glass calls the "Africanization of American
movement"—the white embrace of rhythmic fluidity, hip-centered motion,
individual creativity within a set pattern, the loose carriage of the body—peaked
in these years.[103]
How could people participate in
technoscapes? By dancing the industrial changes generated by big band swing
machines into their individual systems. The long arm of the harm done by the
condescension implicit in the stereotype that "blacks have rhythm"
has deprived cultural history of one of its fundamental truths:
West-African-derived American popular music makes life in these machine ages
swing. Since "rhythm" could not be copyrighted, white cross-over
artists simply used what they loved. At the height of his fame, swing superstar
Glenn Miller admitted that no white band could touch the rhythmic mastery of
"Negro bands." "I don't see how any white leader can be
satisfied with his rhythm after hearing so many wonderful colored rhythm
sections," Miller told Downbeat in 1939. "Even the second rate
Negro bands have good rhythm."[104] The masters of rhythmic flow—the most
important element in machine-age art—were African-American swing-era musicians
and dancers.
When architects such as Walter Gropius
and Le Corbusier declared the need to humanize the functionalism of engineered
forms through the "texture, tones ... light and shadow" of the
architect's craft,[105] I find this analogous to swing-era
musicians bringing texture and depth to 1920s jazz through a more powerful
rhythm section, a richer variety of tone colors, and a more subtle use of
dynamics. Certainly the heavily-arranged jazz of big band swing also reflects
the mass production of music, and of reducing the jazz musician's individual
freedom to specialized function. As for the stripping of ornament to create
clean, flowing lines, big band arrangers eliminated the collective
improvisation and raucousness of the New Orleans style in favor of smoothness,
rhythmic flow, controlled masses (i.e., instrumental sections), and powerful
motion. Music scholars often used the term "streamlining" to express
the shift from 1920s jazz to big band swing.
Swing music and dance have been
omitted from modernist discussions of rhythmic flow in part because
African-American musicians and dancers did not theorize about what was then
simply called "the machine." Duke Ellington never mentioned the
liberating or debilitating effects of the machine; he did, however, write often
about music's role in social relations, and the necessity of reflecting social
and cultural forces. When Ellington stylized train sounds and rhythms into
musical compositions, his approach derived not from machine-driven modernism
but from two functional imperatives of African-derived musical practice:
that music is (functionally) for dance, and that it must aesthetically stylize
the common environment in sound.