The Jazz Scene

By Eric Hobsbawm

Pantheon, 1993. 392 pp., $39.95 (hb)

Reviewed by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/10590

During the Depression, the suburban teenager, Eric Hobsbawm, tried to convert his cousin to communism. He wasn't successful, but his cousin did convert Eric to jazz, and Hobsbawm, later a renowned Marxist historian, remained constant to jazz and communism for the rest of his life.

Hobsbawm's jazz writings, originally under the pseudonym of Francis Newton, have, however, been harder to obtain than his splendid histories. Fortunately, a recent reissue of his 1959 book, The Jazz Scene, updated with some of his later 1980s writings, is now finding its way onto the bookshelves.

For a social and musical history of jazz, there are few better books than this, although considerable chunks of it are now quite dated and it sometimes has the bland quality of a beginners' guide when Hobsbawm seeks to initiate novices from the world of commercial popular music into the complex wonders of jazz.

The history of jazz has been marked by its role as a cultural embodiment of social and political difference from the mainstream, though in contradictory ways. Jazz has sometimes been an accompaniment to social rebellion, in a subliminal or conscious way.

The radical questioning of society and the embrace of unconventional music have often gone together, although it is a long way from saxophonist Archie Shepp's musical commemoration of Malcolm X in 1968 to the career of the apolitical Louis Armstrong.

On the other hand, jazz can be an elitist symbol for middle class separatists keen to distinguish themselves from mass plebeian culture, and for young ruling class trainees defining their "superior" class and taste in the bohemian margins of the universities.

Jazz first cohered as a distinct musical genre around the turn of the century in New Orleans as a black popular music. These origins led to some panic amongst conservatives — "an atrocity in polite society", fumed a New Orleans paper in 1918 which located civilisation in the "refined sentiment and respectful emotion of an eighteenth century minuet".

The popular appeal of jazz formed the basis of the "Jazz Age" from 1917 to 1929, although its transformation into popular but musically utilitarian dance music did dilute its creativity. The Swing Era from 1929 to 1941 forged a new direction for jazz. It also remained popular with its winning formula of "insistent rhythm and considerable noise".

Commercial success eventually stifled the development of jazz until the musical revolutionaries of the '40s and '50s (John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis) loaded up their saxes and trumpets with free-ranging experimentation, a more fractured beat, tilts towards atonality and other weapons from the avant-gardists' armoury in rebellion against the increasingly standardised and repetitive sound of the big bands.

This more abstract music was "as complex as Bach but based on a specifically black foundation, the blues". The vanguard of this new revolution was black and gave it a radical cultural significance, reflecting not only a rebellion against racist discrimination in society but a more general dissent against commercialism and regimentation in music and life.

Dizzy Gillespie was a bricklayer's son, Charlie Parker came from a slum area of Kansas City, and Miles Davis was once arrested for failing to move on, and had his face bloodied by racist police in 1959 as he was taking a break outside the club he was playing in. In this postwar black music, many white youths "recognised a malaise and unspecified rebelliousness like their own" and made avant-garde jazz into the music of the Beats and an urban counter-culture.

Jazz became part of a youth protest against all aspects of "the American way of life". As Hobsbawm points out, however, if jazz was the only focus of rebellion by deviant members of the middle class, then the result would not be a lasting politicisation, and the young mavericks would turn into respectable bourgeois in the end.

Hobsbawm is careful not to do a Zhdanov and allocate jazz neatly to one or another political pigeonhole. The jazz of the '50s giants has, according to Hobsbawm, been unchallenged. It is largely true that no major new school has since emerged. Later developments have tended to be elaborations on previous eras of jazz, especially that of the '50s, whose longevity may be explained by the difficulty that commercialism has had in coopting the likes of a Miles Davis, the subject of one of Hobsbawm's most acute analyses — "a genuine poet of jazz" whose trumpet-playing has "a slow, ghostly, muted, faraway lyricism" and whose "reflective melancholy and sometimes naked desolation" are a result of Davis' "rare ability to suggest vistas beyond the sound of his horn, stretching into some sad sort of infinity".

The evocative beauty of Davis' trumpet must rank with the most profound of Beethoven's piano sonatas, though Hobsbawm's judgment that Davis veers towards "self-pity and denial of life" is open to doubt. It is also possible to dissent from Hobsbawm's bias towards Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong as the best that jazz has ever or will ever produce.

But the jazz community would be poorer without its fractious and argumentative disciples. As Hobsbawm concludes, jazz is "unofficial, unestablished and unpredictable or it is nothing". Jazz lives on with its musical glimpse beyond the mundane and the routine. That will ensure its place in the mundane and routine world of capitalism. And with the explosion of creativity under socialism (jazz bands toured the Soviet Union in the early '20s before Stalin pronounced jazz anathema), jazz will really blossom.