Duke Ellington's Music: The Catalyst for a True Jazz Criticism

Author(s): Ron Welburn

Source: International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Jun.,
1986), pp. 111-122
Published by: Croatian Musicological Society
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R. WELBURN, JAZZ CRITICISM, IRASM 17 (1986), 1, 111-122 Ill

DUKE E,TJINGTON'S MUSIC: THE

CATALYST FOR A TRUE JAZZ
CRITICISM

UDC: 78.072:785,161
RON WELBURN
Original Scientific Paper
Izvorni znanstveni dlanak
POB 692, GUILDERLAND, N.Y. 12084, Received: November 9, 1985
Prispjelo: 9. studenoga 1985.
U.S.A. Accepted: April 7, 1986
Prihvaceno: 7. travnja 1986.

Abstract

Jazz criticism, as a new literature negro jazz.< Reviewing selected Elling-

for an American musical phenomenon, ton recordings in the Boston-based Pho-
was characterized in the 1920s by writ- nograph Monthly Review during 1926
ings about social issues and a proposed and 11(927,young music critic R. D.
refinement of jazz's raw materials into Darrell did not simply bring this music
a national symphonic jazz form. Music to public attention, he generated some
critics Roger Pryor Dodge and in Eng- critical excitement about jazz that prov-
land Constant Lambert led in attempt- ed catalytic to later developments in
ing to distinguish >true jazz< from an jazz criticism as a literary form. Darrell,
ersatz variety. They were also among upon reflection in 1980, stated that de-
critics who sought to establish tenets spite his love of classical music and
for musical criticism. The recordings corresponding ignorance of jazz, >Elling-
of dance orchestra leader Duke Elling- ton first bowled me over with his tonal
ton revealed a multi-thematic and 'effects'< akin to Ravel or Rimsky. Duke
improvisatory music as close as any Ellington's music inspired R. D. Darrell
mainstream jazz performances could to shape the language of the record
resemble the symphonic jazz ideal while review and later evaluative approaches
maintaining the integrity of >genuine for jazz criticism.

The critical literature of jazz music is a new literature for an indige-

nous twentieth-century popular American dance music. During its infancy
this literature contended with and debated important issues like the moral
values of American youth, the aesthetic value of jazz, the search for a na-
tional music form for the United States, and the challenges faced by all
professional musicians compelled to satisfy a dance-loving public. By the
late 1920s the critical writings about jazz began developing and affirming

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112 R. WELBURN, JAZZ CRITICISM, IRASM 17 (1986), 1, 111-122

criteria by which jazz could be intelligently discussed in general interest

magazines, musical periodicals, newspapers, and eventually the nascent
specialized jazz periodicals. The young jazz critics of the 1930s established
their own authority in a grand and often brash manner. Between them
and their predecessors of the immediate post-World War One era and the
Jazz Age who wrote about jazz sociology and symphonic jazz stand a few
unheralded writers who brought jazz criticism through a significant tran-
sitional stage. This essay will demonstrate the facets of this development as
jazz criticism is essentially an American literary phenomenon though it
benefits from some British and European writers who contributed useful
theoretical insights.
As the Twenties ended, very little in the way of aesthetic criticism
reconciled the outstanding problems that were part of the symphonic jazz
vogue. Those problems were actually issues involving jazz as a means to
encourage young adults to listen to classical music, having to do with the
value of the fundamental rhythms and melodies of earlier jazz, and cham-
pioning jazz as a basis for an American national music. Symphonic jazz
dominated the attention of American critics while mainstream improvised
jazz was ignored. But by the late Twenties a handful of critics began to pay
attention to small group jazz or jazz by medium-sized orchestras as writing
about symphonic jazz declined.
A working definition of symphonic jazz is appropriate here. By sym-
phonic jazz I mean the music composed for symphony orchestras or cham-
ber ensembles that possesses elements of jazz rhythm, melodic contour, and
the kind of harmony associated with blacks. It aroused critical attention
in the early Twenties that perhaps properly falls in the realm of classical
music and formal music critical theory and practice. To most recognized
music critics of the Twenties, jazz meant works by George Gershwin, Er-
nest Krenek, John Alden Carpenter, Louis Gruenberg, or Darius Milhaud.
In the Thirties, symphonic jazz was hardly mentioned either by jazz jour-
nalist-critics, or by classical music critics writing something about jazz,
except as a phenomenon of the previous decade.
The piece de resistance of the symphonic jazz movement was George
Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, presented by Paul Whiteman at the 1924
concert at Aeolian Hall in New York. Mixed critical reaction greeted this
event, although much of it found something encouraging about the possi-
bilities of jazz dressed, as it were, in formal attire.1 Following its success
were symposia conducted by and published in The League of Composers'
Review (the forerunner of Modern Music) and The Etude, featuring com-

1 Olin DOWNES, >>Concertof Jazz<, New York Times, 13 February, 1924, p. 16;
H. O. O., >'An Experiment in Music'<<,Musical Courier, February 21, 1924, p. 39;
Henrietta STRAUS, >Jazz and 'The Rhapsody in Blue',<<Nation 118 (March 5, 1924):
263.

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R. WELBURN, JAZZ CRITICISM, IRASM 17 (1986), 1, 111-122 113

ments by noted composers and conductors (and a few theatre managers).2

Henry O. Osgood, Olin Downes of the New York Times, Charles L. Bucha-
nan, and Gilbert Seldes, editor of the Seven Lively Arts, as well as the
British critic Ernest Newman were major voices among the many who
addressed this new music in the mid-1920s.
As Osgood put it in his So This Is Jazz of 1926, the classical minded
American had been shown the source of the nation's musical perpetuation
in an institutional way - the orchestration of simple negro and Tin Pan
Alley melodies into grand schemes. He found the response to this encour-
aging. Neil Leonard, in his 1962 study, Jazz and the White Americans,
looked upon Osgood and other symphonic jazz sympathizers as moderates
standing between anti-jazz conservatives on the one hand and the radical
followers of black bands and New Orleans-styled white bands critics vir-
tually ignored.3 As early as 1928, one writer recalled Gilbert Seldes as a
defender of the lively small-group jazz that other critics disapproved of
so strongly.4 In the 1957 edition of this Seven Lively Arts (originally pub-
lished in 1923), Seldes reflected on the preposterousness of the contro-
versy involving symphonic jazz at the expense of small-group jazz.
As Seldes understood it, the symphonic jazz vogue tended to discount
the importance, where the awareness existed, of funeral music by New
Orleans bands; in the Twenties, the principally exploited qualities of black
jazz were what Seldes called >the anti-intellectual ones<, the snappy
rhythms and the showmanship and acrobatics of instrumentalists.5
But the success at Aeolian Hall at least resulted in an unexpected
development of a nascent critical method for the jazz performance, whether
symphonic or improvised. Inheriting this critical development were critics
of varied literary and musical experience who saw the importance of the
jazz improvisatory mainstream and wrote about it intelligently: Roger
Pryor Dodge, B. H. Haggin, Constant Lambert, and Robert Donaldson (R.
D.) Darrell.
Dodge, primarily a professional dancer who wrote occasional articles
on jazz, in a 1929 essay, ,Negro Jazz<, doubted that Paul Whiteman and
George Gershwin fit the description of what he knew as jazz musicians.
He rejected outright the common critical characterization of jazz as con-
sisting only of non-notable rhythm. Jazz was not a new Romanticism

2 See
League of Composers' Review, June, 1924; and Etude, August, 1924, Sep-
tember, 1924. Among respondents were Louis Gruenberg, Hugo Riesenfeld, Norman
Levy, Pitts Sanborn and Percy Grainger.
3 Neil LEONARD, Jazz and the White Americans
(Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1962), pp. 75-77; Henry O. OSGOOD, So This is Jazz, Little, Brown, Bo-
ston 1926.
4 L. Gilbert WOLFE, oThe Modern Jazz Band and !Its Music<,
Billboard, De-
cember 8, 1928, p. 109.
5 Gilbert
SELDES, The Seven Lively Arts, Harper & Bros., New York 1957 ed.,
p. 99.

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 R. WELBURN, JAZZ CRITICISM. IRASM 17 (1986), 1, 111-122
114

based on folk themes. Romanticism in the preceding century, he argued,

had ruined >>contrapuntalism<, a practice that deserved to be developed by
composers. Like the music of Bach, he maintained, jazz was an art music
of the people, and in this regard it possessed
>,some bare melodies, stripped to fundamentalism, driven with a con-
tinuous flow of musical thought to a natural and inevitable conclu-
sion... Jazz melodies, like contrapuntal melodies, inspire both me-
lodic and contrapuntal development and do not depend on full-throat-
ed orchestration to cover a lack of fundamental virility.<
True jazz, then, possessed >,a rhythm that carries it through to its conclu-
sion without pausing for false emotional effects.<
Dodge furthermore argued that the soloist in jazz would contribute
to the flowering of this virile jazz already expressed by pianist James P.
Johnson, trumpeters Louis Armstrong and Bubber Miley of the Duke
Ellington orchestra, and blues singer Clara Smith. True jazz, Dodge asser-
ted, was rooted in the blues and >>willexist so long as the negro lives in
our civilization, but not of it.,, Black jazz differs sharply
>,from the civilized and elegant versions of the symphonic jazz band.
For the negro has taken the least possible contribution from the notes
of the melody. He distorts it beyond recognition, makes of it a new
- whereas that of the
synthesis, and his product is a composition
symphonic band is no more than a clever arrangement.<
This clear explanation of how improvisation characterized true jazz was
extremely important to the theoretical development of jazz criticism.
The good qualities jazz held had barely been tapped, in Dodge's esti-
mation, as American composers decided to use jazz for other ends instead
of developing jazz from within. Dodge looked upon the heralded triumverate
of Whiteman, Gershwin, and Irving Berlin as exponents of the frivolous,
led astray by their mutual misunderstanding of syncopation and their
inability to conceptualize jazz that was not in classical music attire. >,Low-
-down, jazz was the best jazz anyone could encounter and it was best ex-
emplified by black musicians ,and those lower members of the white race
who have not yet lost their feeling for the primitive.<6 Note here that this
idea of the primitive - or as Dodge actually put it, ,>a musical form pro-
duced by the primitive innate musical instinct of the negro.. . - reflec-
ted a long-standing racialistic notion about Afro-American expressive
realities held by some who surprisingly defended that culture. Because the
philosophical thrust in jazz criticism continued to uphold aesthetic re-
finement for jazz music, terms like ,civilization< versus >>primitive< con-
tributed to the vocabulary of criticism.
In his overview of music of the Twenties written in 1930, B. H. Haggin,
music columnist for The Nation, placed more responsilbility for the future
6 Roger Pryor DODGE, >>Negro Jazz<, The Dancing Times, October, 1929, pp. 32,
34-35.

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R. WELBURN, JAZZ CRITICISM, IRASM 17 (1986), 1, 111-122
115

of jazz in the hands of the critics than did Dodge. The critic's responsibility
was one that quite harkens back to time-honored tenets:
>[He] imposes a spurious but plausible harmony and logic upon the
confusion he finds in the universe... Clarification, organization, prin-
ciples, judgements which imply all these, are expected of him, and
he produces them. In his criticism he gives to the art as a whole an
organization it does not possess... The entire system of criticism
remains uncontradicted by fact and consistent internally and retains
its appearance of truth.<
The critic, then, must keep his finger on the theoretical pulse that suggests
American music is not considered American if it lacks any expressions
from the nation's folk music. The successful artist, in other words
>must draw artistic nourishment from the life into which he was
born, in which his life is rooted; a composer must make his music
out of the folk and popular music of his country which expresses the
emotional character of his people.<
American >classics< Haggin continued, tend to be of local origin and inter-
est. Yet criticism's flaw lays in its presuming there is no national music
unless that music is of the cultivated or classical type. To be sure, he
argued, jazz rhythms are quite simple but the attempt at Aeolian Hall to
>improve< and refine jazz merely added weighty pretentions to the
overall subject. Gilbert Seldes had done just this in his 1923 essay for
The Dial, ,Toujours Jazz<, confusing those elements in jazz with those
that were actually complex. Forcing complexities on jazz was one way
of making it acceptable to the classical composer and critic.7
Dodge and Haggin each explained how they had made their mis-
judgments. From a methodological standpoint and for our purposes they
drew attention to the inherent problems symphonic jazz and its critics
could not reconcile. Both contributed timely ideals to a jazz criticism
that was then largely unformed. Dodge approached the necessity of crit-
icism for jazz by understanding the music itself and by realizing that,
however it appeared, jazz was a remote spinoff of European art music.
Haggin focused on the fundamentals of what criticism was expected to
do, one of which was to oppose arty refinements.
In short, their idea of jazz was inadverently prophetic and had more
to do with a type of symphonic jazz that would escape being pretentious
by holding on to the spirit of improvisation. In essence they did not know
exactly what they were looking for. They nevertheless made important
contributions to jazz criticism even if the day of the jazz critic had barely
dawned. The jazz critic of the mid-1930s by and large had little ior no idea
that critics like Dodge and Haggin, their immediate literary forbears, had
proposed a methodology for the craft of criticism by 1929.
7 B. H. HAGGIN, >Music in the
Twenties<, Saturday Review of Literature 6
(May 17, 1930): 1046; see Gilbert SELDES, >Toujours Jazz((, The Dial 75 (August,
1923): 151--155.

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 JAZZ IRASM 17 (1986), 1, 111-122
116 R. WELBURN, CRITICISM,

Meanwhile, Dodge and Haggin put all their faith in a jazz on the
level of art, seeking some place of honor for Ellington, Armstrong, and
Johnson. They were not specific about whom they championed, which
creates some difficulty for the student of criticism. But as the symphonic
jazz movement of the 1920s came to a close, one jazz orchestra leader
gaining popularity but critically ignored was Edward >>Duke- Ellington,
whose personal standard for jazz orchestration did not ignore dancers'
likes or the Afro-American musical tradition.
Ellington's jazz recordings, particularly -,Black and Tan Fantasy<< and
>Creole Rhapsody., were multi-thematic works as close as any mainstream
jazz performances could resemble symphonic jazz without actually be-
coming it. They demonstrated Ellington's enormous talent for composing
and orchestration while he did not deliberately set out to accommodate
himself to the style in which Gershwin and other symphonic jazz expo-
nents like John Alden Carpenter (Krazy Kat, 1922) and Ernest Krenek
(Jonny spielt auf, 1927) worked. Two classical musical critics wrote flowery
yet perceptive reviews of Ellington records, R. D. Darrell, a young Bos-
tonian who helped establish Phonograph Monthly Review in 1926, and
Constant Lambert, a seasoned British critic with an American following
whom Ellington's music converted to liking jazz after having had rabid
anti-jazz sentiments.
Darrell wrote reviews of classical music recordings for the new peri-
odical. He knew little or nothing about jazz and otherwise did not seem
interested in it. Jazz confused him in 1926 as being a possible >,menace to
'serious music',< despite Gershwin's famed Rhapsody reigning as its widely
acclaimed exponent. For some unknown reason he found himself imme-
diately won over to Ellington's >>Black and Tan Fantasy.<8 In what hap-
pened to be his lengthiest record review of the period, Darrell (using the
pseudonym Rufus) highly regarded the Ellington work, most importantly
describing its features with a detail not even Gershwin's music had re-
ceived. The Ellington band recorded under its initial name, The Washing-
tonians, and Darrell enjoyed the way they combined sonorous and tonal
qualities with >amazing eccentric instrumental effects..< There were no
extremes, and the >stunts< the band employed truly had musical value.
The band played an original music at the end of which was a brief inter-
polation of the >Chopin Funeral March..< This facet contributed to its
overall appeal.9

8 Robert D. DARRELL, >>DoesAmerica Appreciate the Best Music?<<Phonograph

Monthly Review 1 (October 1926): 8-1'1; R. D. DARRELL, letter to author, June 23,
1980: >>Ellingtonfirst bowled me over with his tonal 'effects', his gift for orchestra-
tion/instrumentation worthy of a Ravel or Rimsky[-Korsakov]. Later I soon grew
to treasure almost as much his gift (worthy of a Schubert) for melodic invention. But
I never really 'placed' him in the mainstream of jazz as such.<
9 >>Rufus, >Dance Record<, Phonograph Monthly Review 1 (July, 1927): 445.

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R. WELBURN, JAZZ IRASM 17 (1986), 1, 111-122
CRITICISM, 117

Classical music critics had long railed against playing classical music
melodies and excerpts in a jazz or ragtime style (but these same critics
did not mind 4improving, jazz to sound like classical music).10 Perhaps
due to his youth and overall inexperience, Darrell registered no annoyance
at Ellington's Chopin interpolation. Darrell's writing style and expository
skills featured unobtrusive metaphors and impressions. Reviewing Elling-
ton's >Black Beauty<< he states:
>Ellington quite surpasses himself on Vocalion 15704 in Black Beauty
and Take It Easy, both his own compositions. Both rank with his
finest efforts: the curiously twisted and wry trumpet passages, the
amazing piano solo in Black Beauty, the splendid melodic urge that
animates even the most eccentric measures, are all characteristic of
his unique genius for the expression of an overwhelming nostalgia
and bitterness in a new idiom, and one entirely his own.<<T1
This is the entire review, and demonstrates one aspect of his critical
style: brevity. Ellington's music provoked discussion of fine points in
ensemble and solo execution. Darrell at once recognized and accepted
the magnitude of Ellington's imagination. >Rufus< discussed some dance
records for Phonograph Monthly Review and his brief reviews usually
indicate whether or not a recorded performance was up to the particular
artist's standards. He liked the recordings of another jazz musician, Red
Nichols, but reserved for Ellington analysis in glowing and descriptive
language. His expository skills for reviewing >Black and Tan Fantasy<,
were carried on to his reviews of jazz records outside the symphonic jazz
idiom.
While Constant Lambert was an internationally known critic, his
Music Ho!, published in London in 1934, devoted a substantial portion
to how encouraging he found black jazz bands:
>the only jazz music of technical importance is that small section of
it that is genuinely negroid. The >*hiot<negro records still have a
genuine and not merely galvanic energy, while blues have a certain
austerity that places them far above the sweet nothings of George
Gershwin. 12

Duke Ellington's music exerted a tremendous impact on both his enthu-

siasm and his reasoning. American jazz was superior to any other, Lambert
said, because
>The negros there are in touch not so much with specifically barbaric,
elements as with sophisticated elements. Negro talent being on the
10 e. g. >>Jazz Hymns Draw
Fire?, New York Times, 2 August, 19!25, sec. 1, p, 27;
>Postpones Hymn Program<<, New York Times, 3 August, 11925, p. 18; Moses SMITH,
>From Jazz to Symphony<, Phonograph Monthly Review 1 (November, 1926): 18.
" >Rufus<, >Dance Recordso, Phonograph Monthly Review 2 (September, 1928):
457.
12 Constant
LAMBERT, Music Ho! A Study of Music In Decline, Faber & Faber,
London 1934, p. 212.

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 R. WELBURN, JAZZ IRASM 17 (1986), 1, 111-122
118 CRITICISM,

whole more executive than creative, and modern negro music being
essentially an applied art, jazz is naturally largely dependent for its
progress on the progress of the sophisticated material used as a basis
for its rhythmic virtuosity.?
The sudden flowering of jazz after the war, in his view,
>>was due largely to the adoption as raw material of the harmonic
richness and orchestral subtlety of the Debussy-Delius period of
highbrow music.<'13
For that reason Lambert was not surprised to hear classical elements
instead of African music in Ellington's music because
>Ellington, like all negro composers, had to use the European harmonic
framework... [thus representing] the application of the negro tem-
perament to an alien tradition and an acquired lingo._<14
Lambert here affirmed jazz as an American - yea Western - music as
he demonstrated this insight for how a black composer-orchestrator
rendered his musical ideas. His calling attention to >negro temperament<
was a significant contribution to establishing a foundation for the theory
of jazz criticism and general jazz journalism, so few writers comprehending
the idea of temperament (a mode in artistic aesthetics) up to that time.
On the other hand, Lambert's understandable misapprehension of exec-
utive versus creative talent suggests he had not heard a range of jazz
composers or arrangers' recordings, namely Fletcher Henderson and Don
Redman. Furthermore, had he considered Louis Armstrong's recordings
seriously, he would have better appreciated black creativity outside his
preference for the large scale orchestration given by Ellington.
Lambert gave Duke EIlington's recorded performances an exhaustive
critique in his book, focusing on their qualities of design, coloration, and
dexterity that occasionally, he believed, surpassed Ravel or Stravinsky.
In his estimation, Ellington was >a real composer< and both the first jazz
and the first black composer >of distinction."15 Ellington's music, then,
had inspired Lambert to make an about-face from his expressed anti-jazz
position of 1928 in an essay very critical especially of the symphonic jazz
vogue. But one of his opinions did not change: Gershwin's Rhapsody in
Blue was still an inept piece of music that adversely affected all symphonic
jazz that followed. Now with Ellington and his music, critics had a standard
by which they could measure jazz as they did classical music composers,
American or European, who set out to compose symphonic jazz.16 In the
rather glib sense indicated by the heading of this chapter, Ellington is a
major jazz figure whose music satisfied both inclinations, a musical
catalyst for the new literary or journalistic indulgence of jazz criticism.
13
Ibid., p. 205-206.
14 Ibid., p. 203.
15
Ibid., p. 213.
16 Ibid., p. 215; see Constant LAMBERT, >Jazz(<, Life and Letters 1 (July, 1928):
124-131.

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R. WELBURN, JAZZ CRITICISM, IRASM 17 (1986), 1, 111-122 119

Notwithstanding the fact that symphonic jazz was finished as a major

jazz vogue or inclination of style among classical-minded composers and
musicians, Ellington turned out to be, in the views of both Lambert and
Darrell, a unique jazz composer who had perfected the treatment of
popular dance music by using classical music elements. His music freed
both Lambert and Darrell from conventions in the language and syntax
of musical criticism. Never did the classically trained symphonic jazz
composers enjoy the fluidity and controlled spontaneity of language
Darrell employed in writing about Ellington, as though the band leader-
-composer himself had inspired the writer to fashion a language of criti-
cism poetic in its description yet precise as one could be about music in
its meaning. The recognized symphonic jazz composers did not inspire
lively writing like Darrell's and the critics and music reporters who scruti-
nized them would not permit their perceptions and styles to bend in order
to enliven the language of criticism through an approach that was enjoy-
able to read.
Of the other recognized classical music critics of importance in the
1920s, M. D. Calvocaressi and Rollo Myers in particular recommended
avoiding a subjective approach to the craft because it presumes the reader
knows the tastes and views of the writer.17 Yet, another critic, Samuel
Stephenson Smith, writing in 1931 on what criticism involved and how
it could be written well, realized what in effect Darrell demonstrated and
what jazz critics of a later period would practice: simply that one could
easily succumb to write about jazz >in broken rhythms, harsh dissonances,
and staccato exclamations of modern prose technique. But it is not
to explain one confusion in terms of another, so it is better to resorteasy to
impressionistic prose a little sparingly.- When writing about jazz he went
on, ,why strain the prose medium by trying to make it do the work of a
jazz orchestra ?<ls
The jazz critic, then, would, by all available accounts, have to bend
the rules adhered to by classical music critics in order to convey the
essence of the peculiar dynamism of jazz composition and performance.
Furthermore, Darrell and Lambert had yet to become fully involved in
writing about the jazz performance where solo improvisation was the
principal characteristic, although as Darrell continued into the 1930s he
would understand that solos were not simply >>passages<, but
on-the-spot
inventions.
Darrell may not have been abreast of what was going on in the
philosophy of musical criticism among formal composer-critic journalists

17 M. D. CALVOCARESSI, >>TowardsA Method in Musical Criticism<<,Musical

Quarterly 9! (January, 19'23): 7'2-81; Rollo H. MYERS, >The Possibilities of Musical
Criticism<<,Musical Quarterly 14 (1928): 392, 393-394.
18 Samuel S.
SMITH, The Craft of th( Critic, Thomas Y, Crowell, New York 1931;
rep. Books for Libraries Press, New York 1969, p. 294,

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120 R. WELBURN, JAZZ CRITICISM, IRASM 17 (1986), 1, 111-122

since World War One; nor may he have known much about formal critical
procedures beyond what he absorbed just from reading Philip Hale and
H. T. Parker in the Boston newspapers and in James Huneker, George
Dyson and a few others in music periodicals.19 Those critics, with their
collective background in a musical education and a nurtured skill in the
practice of writing well about such a perplexing subject as music gave
the young Darrell (born in 1904) a rewarding and solid foundation in prose
and also in how a critic functions for the sake of the musician-composer
and the audience.
Darrell unwittingly did as Ernest Newman, another British critic,
encouraged all critics to do in his A Musical Critic's Holiday of 1925:
>separate the vital man of a new movement from the rest, and then
quietly ignore the rest.< Minor musical figures play no part when the
responsible critic as opposed to the mere reporter is able >to trace con-
necting lines of force, to see the history of music as an organic whole.<20
Although Newman's book on the backgrounds and functions of criti-
cism did not discuss jazz and though he much maligned jazz in the Twen-
ties, his advice to critics is sound in the abstract.21 Jazz, a new music
with then a mainstream popular dance appeal and an experimental sym-
phonic component, demanded from its critics and reporters accurate de-
scriptions of its performances, which in being recorded were introducing
a novel, certainly twentieth-century development to the fore.
Perhaps naively, Darrell's excitement about >Black and Tan Fantasy<
was infectious although his prose style simply allowed the reader >to see
the thing as he sees it.<22 His vivid details alone were not unusual in
established music criticism; Helen Billet Lowry described Paul Whiteman's
music five years earlier, mingling subjectivity and objectivity in relating
that >Long, soft passages occur, more dreamy than an old-time waltz-
to be followed by the throbbing moments of excitement when the music
has become a maddened rhapsody.<23 Still, this writing of Lowry's lacked
Darrell's sense of energy and enthusiasm and the feeling of having really
stumbled upon something refreshing and new.
Between the times Lowry and Darrell wrote their reviews a number
of symphonic jazz works had come and gone, impressing some who reveled
in jazz's gifts to American composition and annoying others who never
accepted its alleged potential. What passed for criticisms of so much of
the symphonic jazz were actually veiled assessments and analyses of the
confusion that was generated by the academic music of Western civili-
zation, especially considering the radical departures in composition and
presentation by such composers as Arnold Schoenberg and George Antheil.
19 DARRELL, letter to author, June 23, 1980.
20Ernest NEWMAN, A Musical Critic's Holiday, Knopf, New York 1925, p. 293.
21 Ibid., pp. 216-219 passim.
22
Ibid., p. 32.
23 Helen BILLET LOWRY, )Putting the Music Into Jazz<, New York Times Book
Review & Magazine, 19 February, 1922, p. 8.

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R. WELBURN, JAZZ CRITICISM, IRASM 17 (1986), 1, 111-122 121

Darrell professed no Americanist sympathies for the fate of the nation's

music. He was too young when he first wrote on Duke Ellington to be
strapped by such arguments and too busy writing and editing Phonograph
Monthly Review to engage in more than the concentration his duties
required. Finding Ellington's music bearing a striking resemblance to
some of the characteristics of classical harmony and colorative effect,
Darrell stepped forward in his new periodical with its limited circulation
to discuss not what Ellington meant in any larger historical and aesthetic
perspective but what struck him about the qualities iof individual recorded
examples of his music. By itself, the record review adds a novel genre
to musical criticism. It benefitted from a critic dedicated to discovering
(however accidently) its potential and exploiting its impact. R. D. Darrell
could hail >Black and Tan Fantasy,< as the first true example of symphonic
jazz by use of the recorded example, and even if it was half-heartedly
at best composed to fit that particular style.
Ellington was fortunate that the young critic linked his music to that
vogue. Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue was recorded with some editing to
the score four months after its premiere and again in 1927 - both by
Paul Whiteman (with his principal arranger Ferde Grofe responsible for
the full orchestration).24 Recording it did not, however, salvage the style.
>Black and Tan Fantasy< would have piqued the interest of those with
classical music tastes had those critics attempted to listen to it and more
importantly written a review. With jazz as an inextricably twentieth-
-century phenomenon, critics who might be said were born with the
century, would best be in a position to comprehend and describe it. The
process proved to be a tedious one, but R. D. Darrell holds a lofty place
in jazz criticism's forthcoming critic aspirants.
This phenomenon in American musical criticism, with Duke Ellington's
music as a catalyst for its growth, now stood at the threshold of the ex-
pansion and development the brash young critics at Metronome and the
new Down Beat magazines would begin encouraging by the middle 1930s.
The training and inclination of these younger critics was not in classical
music, and their collective enthusiasm reveals them to be staunch aficia-
nados of a unique popular dance music form that offered band members

24 Thornton HAGERT, annot., An Experiment in Modern Music: Paul Whiteman

at Aeolian Hall, Smithsonian Collection R0218; 1925 Catalog of Victor Records (Cam-
den, N. J.: Victor Talking Machine Company, 11925), n. p., indicates Rhapsody in Blue
as a 12-inch recording in two parts, catalog number 55225; Catalog of Victor Records
1930 (Camden: RCA-Victor Company, 1930), n. p., lists the work as Victor 35822. This
recording, made in 1927, is listed as the Paul Whiteman Concert Orchestra, the r,ame
as the 1924 recording. It is listed in Walter BRUYNINCKX, coll and comp., 60 Years of
Recorded Jazz, 1917-1977 (Mechelen, Belgium: Walter Bruyninckx 1980-1982), p.
W331. Brian RUST, The American Dance Band Discography, 1917-1942, vol. 2, Arling-
ton House, New Rochelle, 1975, pp. r1924, 19311, lists these recordings separately from
the >,Paul Whiteman Orchestra<< as the >>Paul Whiteman Concert Orchestra<, a unit
augmented in size from the regular orchestra. Whiteman also recorded Gershwin's
Concerto in F for Columbia Recording Company in 1'928, BRUYNINCKX, p. W337

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 R. WELBURN, JAZZ CRITICISM, IRASM 17 (1986), 1, 111-122
122

opportunities for individual improvisation. They disliked what they viewed

as a highbrow interpretation of jazz that in the 1920s focused on its
societal associations or that sought to fulfill Paul Whiteman's >ladylike?
projections for jazz. In a cultural milieu where memory is short, R. D.
Darrell, and to a lesser degree Roger Pryor Dodge and Constant Lambert,
did more for the younger cri;tics than those critics were aware. Duke
Ellington's music, with its multi-thematic and improvisatory character-
istics, provided Darrell a means of shaping and refining the language
specifically of the record review and in general the evaluative tenets of
jazz criticism.

Sazetak

GLAZBA DUKEA ELLINGTONA: KATALIZATOR ISTINSKE JAZZ KRITIKE

Jazz kritiku, kao novu literaturu za jedan americki glazbeni fenomen, karak-
teriziralo je u dvadesetim godinama 20. stoljeca pisanie o drustvenim pitanjima i
predlozenom dotjerivanju sirovog jazz materijala u nacionalnu simfonijsku jazz
formu. Glazbeni kriti6ari Roger Pryor Dodge i Englez Constant Lambert predvodili
su u pokusajima razlikovanja >istinskog jazzao od raznovrsnih nadomjestaka. Oni su
takoder bili medu kriticarima koji su trazili da se ustanove nacela glazbene kritike.
Snimke vode plesnog orkestra Dukea Ellingtona otkrivaju visetematsku i im-
provizacijsku glazbu, koja bi mogla sliciti na ideal simfonijskog jazza koliko I heka
druga vaznija struja jazz izvodenja, zadrzavajuci integritet >izvornog crnackog
jazza<<.Recenzirajuci izabrane Ellingtonove snimke u bostonskom casopisu Phono-
graph Monthly Review u 1926. i 1927, mladi glazbeni kriti6ar R. D. Darrell nije samo
svratio paznju publike na tu glazbu. nego je i izazvao stanovito kriticarsko uzbu-
denje oko jazza koje se pokazalo katalizatorskim za kasniji razvitak jazz kritike
kao literarne forme. Darrell je, na temelju primjedbe iz 1980, ustvrdio da ga je -
usprkos njegove ljubavi za klasicnu glazbu i odgovarajuceg ignoriranja jazza-
?Ellington prvi 'oborio' svojim tonalnim 'efektima'< srodnim Ravelu i Rimski-Kor-
sakovu. Glazba Dukea Ellingtona inspirirala je R. D. Darrella na oblikovanje jezika
recenzijf plofa i na kasnije vrednujuce pristupe u jazz kritici.

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