Part 2 - "1959: The Beginning of Beyond: A Critical Debate at the End of the 1950s" - Darius Brubeck

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Part 2 from the Darius Brubeck’s essay - 1959: The Beginning of Beyond - which in its final form, it serves as Chapter 10 in Merwyn Cooke and David Horn, The Cambridge Companion to Jazz [2002].

As noted in the first posting, it’s a long piece, so we have used the subject headings within the essay as a means of presenting it on these pages in smaller samplings.

Darius is not the first to observe 1959 as a pivotal year in the evolution of Jazz but he is one of the few to have written about it in a broader context, one that goes well beyond the immediate impact of developments that took place that year. We wrote to him to request his permission to offer it as a blog feature and he kindly gave his consent for us to do so.

Not much as changed in the world of Jazz criticism since the publication of the articles by John Mehegan and André Hodier in the Down Beat Special Silver Anniversary Edition [August 20, 1959].

In various manifestations, the anti-intellectualism in Jazz argument espoused by Mehegan’s The Case for Swinging continues to find itself in direct opposition to the Jazz-as-art position put forth by Hodier.

This polarity persists to this day although it would appear that Hodeir’s argument that Jazz is an art form which demands an active role in the service of its creation from an elite audience may have won the day one consequence becoming less than 3% of the listening public favors Jazz today. 

A further elaboration and explanation of these differences of opinions forms the next segment in Darius’ essay about why 1959 was such a pivotal year in Jazz.

© Copyright ® Darius Brubeck, copyright protected; all rights reserved; used with the author’s permission.

A critical debate at the end of the 1950s

“The relationship between theory and practice, the pros and cons of jazz changing into a formalised discipline and getting closer to classical music

and further from 'pop', are the background dynamics for ongoing musical and critical developments in jazz. Much of the jazz from around this time entered the canon and so did the issues debated. The arguments in favour of 'intellectualism' in jazz take on new, unanticipated meanings in the present era of academic Jazz Studies, but anti-intellectual attitudes have remained the same. I believe opposing sides of the intellectualism issue as understood around 1959 are well represented by two articles summarised below. Much of the jazz criticism written in the 1950s revolves around ideas about music, which criteria should apply, what jazz is and is not, the search for 'direction' and the catch-phrase 'where jazz is going'. Readers and writers, musicians and critics, often identified themselves with opposing, prescriptive concepts of jazz' in the abstract, and must have wanted very much to influence others. Participation in an ongoing debate about jazz was apparently part of the joy of being a jazz fan.

Down Beat: Special Silver Anniversary Edition (20 August 1959) features an article entitled The Case for Swinging by John Mehegan, which sums up the history of jazz as 'evolutionary', but argues against further evolution. It also contains Andre Hodeir's Perspective of Modern Jazz: Popularity or Recognition (translated by Eugene Lees), a prescient rumination on the nature of jazz-as-art.

Mehegan was a working jazz pianist and academic, and an influential pioneer in jazz pedagogy - perhaps the first to believe jazz was teachable in a systematic way. Given this background, it is surprising that he espouses a vehement, anti-intellectual line, although it was common in those days to do so. Let me assure the reader that I am not unfairly quoting Mehegan (with whom I studied briefly) in order to make fun of him or his ideas but, rather, because he is the best-informed and most coherent representative of this persuasion. He was not, though it is hard to tell from this article, against modern jazz, but indeed an admirer of Lennie Tristano and Bill Evans and a modern-jazz player himself. Because of his technical knowledge, arguments he used count as an insider's informed opinion and bear consideration if only to arrive at a better understanding of the underlying issues. In other words, they are not the vapourings of a disaffected journalist who 'couldn't swing a rope'. However, in print he adopts a crusty, hostile tone. Near the end of the article he writes:

If we continue to smother [jazz] with a superstructure of complexity and intellectuality it cannot possibly support, we will eventually destroy it. This applies specifically to the cabalists, the metaphysicians, the formalists, the pretenders, the beatniks, the Zen Buddhists and the been-zoolists.

[Mehegan 1959b]

Given the date of publication, exactly at the time of the Lenox School of Jazz (this will follow as a separate blog feature), I believe that his real targets are Gunther Schuller, George Russell and John Lewis, although his shotgun blast takes in the whole avant-garde. Collectively these three were promoting the principles of third-stream music, a meeting of jazz and classical music on an equal basis which contrasts with the random couplings of the distant past. Russell, as we shall see, might indeed qualify as a 'cabalist’ and 'metaphysician', and Schuller and Lewis were uninhibited advocates of intellectualism.

One of Mehegan's pet hates is formalism, which 'has not been generally successful musically speaking for the reason that jazz is basically a folk music employing visceral or non-intellectual materials and, like all folk art, is preponderantly content with a minimum of form'. This attitude should prepare us for the mindset of an academic but anti-intellectual conservative, with certain implicit beliefs about the world. Taking it 'from the top', Mehegan's article (drastically edited) reads:

Did Charlie Parker leave a rich nourishing heritage for future jazz men - or did he finish off the art form?... The time composite of jazz has undergone extensive changes since 1920 ... these changes, coupled with expanding instrumental and writing techniques, express in capsule the morphological history of the art form ...

Although the jazzman has displayed great ingenuity in the areas of time and horizontal extension, he has been singularly uninventive in dealing with the problems of vertical sound (harmony).

This is an odd opinion coming from a jazz pianist, but he does not stop to give reasons for it:

Jazz is and always has been a tonal music employing the diatonic scale as its frame of reference.

Parker himself never questioned the diatonic system in jazz harmony and never made any attempt to destroy it. In fact, as is well known, Parker returned to the most primitive harmonic materials, the blues, in order to deal freely with the horizontal line.

If the opposite of tonality is atonality, then few would fundamentally disagree, however much we might wince at the term 'primitive'

With authoritarian bravura (and spectacular unintended irony), Mehegan concludes with a list of 'essentials' musicians in 1959 would question - or, using his words, 'attack' or 'destroy' - in order to arrive at a fresher conception of jazz:

suppose we accept the circumscribed limits of a diatonic harmonic system, 4/4 time, eighth-note, quarter-note, half-note time composite, eight bar sections and the various attendant qualities we have been accustomed to. The point is that if we learned anything in the past 20 years, we have learned that to abandon or seriously alter any of these basic essentials of a jazz performance results in what can no longer be called jazz.

The four albums mentioned at the beginning of this chapter [Kind of Blue, Time Out, Giant Steps, The Shape of Jazz to Come] are remembered best for doing everything that 'results in what can no longer be called jazz. Thus, in a strange way, one agrees with Mehegan. What was called jazz before 1959 is different from what is called jazz now, supporting the dichotomy between the historical and contemporary mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.

But we are not quite through with Mehegan's case. If we accept the circumscribed limits of jazz he proposes (and his is not a bad description of what - in a statistical sense - jazz is), then his later statement that 'all, it would seem [is] in a state of exhaustion' logically follows. For Mehegan writing in 1959, 'the evolution of jazz' is at an end.

Hodeir's article is not 'the case against swinging' but it is in all other respects an opposing and, indeed, formalist view. In contrast to Mehegan, he is not worried about the 'exhaustion' of jazz as creative music, but rather the time it takes for an increasingly specialised form of creativity to make it into the mainstream. Hodeir demands an active role in the service of creativity from an elite audience. He plunges the readers (of Down Beatl) into the historical and aesthetic problems of modernism, high culture and popular art:

Carried along by the prodigious cadence of constant renewal, jazz dies almost as quickly as it is created... But it happens that the public... does not keep correct time with the rhythm of change... This phenomenon has been observed in European art [when] Cezanne and Debussy unveiled the beginnings of a 'modern art' that is in no way of popular origin.

[Hodeir 1959]

The new problem for modern jazz, according to Hodeir, is that recognition (for an artist or work of art) comes before and perhaps without popularity. For example, Monk was recognised as historically important (in 1959) without having experienced popular acclaim. Like Mehegan, Hodeir constructs the narrative of jazz history around the theme of 'evolution', but they really mean different things by it. Hodeir's evolution is punctuated by outstanding masterworks which show enough strength and strictness of conception to transcend the norm. Mehegan wants to set out rules that define jazz in technical terms that are normative for the genre. (These rules and a concept of 'jazz' itself, rather than any particular manifestation in the form of jazz masterworks, are what evolved out of chaos.) Hodeir does not define jazz at all. Like Ellington and most musicians, he believes that an artist must be free to create without reference to predetermined categories and that there must be valid 'universal' criteria of musical value not limited by genre (see heading quotation on page 153 - “Jazz Among the Classics and The Case for Duke Ellington”).

For Mehegan, generic boundaries are all-important because he is trying to rule out 'what can no longer be called jazz', so 'popular music, and jazz,

while undeniably similar, are really antagonistic terms. The worst outcome of Mehegan's kind of evolutionary theory is that jazz musicians (he does not name any) looking for a way out of the 'cul de sac' of formalism (provided they have admitted they no longer live in the realm of ‘folk-music’) might opt for

The final solution [which] is the oldest one in the world ... Give the people what they want... So at last jazz has joined the other entertaining crafts that form the basis of what we call show business ... The real difference between an art form and an entertaining craft is that an art form has a continuity which demands some contribution from each artist in order to insure its own succession; an entertaining craft makes no demand except that of popularity.                                                              

 (Mehegan 1959b]

Hodeir spends rather more time considering the meanings of the term 'popular'. Although frankly elitist in outlook, he never equates popular with vulgar. He also does not slip into the present-day assumption that popular equals commercial:

A musical work can be popular in two very different ways: by its origin and by its audience. They do not always coincide.

... the art of Ellington, and still more that of Armstrong, remained rather close to the popular origins [note the strict sense of 'popular' here] wherefrom jazz was little by little emancipated. Both won popularity before the cultural interest in jazz was fully realised. And it is only fair to add that they contributed powerfully to the recognition of jazz as an art. Better yet, jazz recognition was identified with their recognition.

With the advent of modern jazz, however, the problem of achieving popularity truly began to pose itself... For having wished to invent a complex language, suitable to convey a certain number of new truths, jazz became an art of specialists; in cutting itself free of its popular sources, it voluntarily limited itself to an audience of connoisseurs. Then it became risky to seek popularity if, deep down, one did not wish to give up what had been gained in modern jazz.

True popularity for a 'difficult work' is recognition by a reasonably large elite. The most celebrated masterpieces have taken this cultural route to success; it is a route that is necessarily long. A work, an artist, is recognised only thanks to the diffusing influence of a few clairvoyant souls...

And on a cultural level, the demand that this work show enough strength and strictness of conception to reach those whose sensibilities were nourished and developed by the greatest artists remains the least deceptive criterion of recognition.

Aside from those happy few who today appreciate it, the most advanced jazz has already launched invisible missiles toward the public of tomorrow.

[Hodeir 1959J

To be continued .... [including more discussion of “invisible missiles”]