The Review of "Lost Chords" in the New York Times and My Response
by
The Review in the New York Times
July 11, 1999
White Men Can Jam Jazz, the author argues, is not just the music of black America.
By JASON BERRY
LOST CHORDS
White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945.
By Richard M. Sudhalter.
Illustrated. 890 pp. New York:
Oxford University Press.
This is a mountainous, flawed, vast reach of a book that promotes a color-blind interpretation of jazz history. ''The music may not be so much a black American experience as an American experience, with various racial and ethnic groups playing indispensable and interlocking roles,'' Richard M. Sudhalter, a trumpeter and the co-author of a biography of Bix Beiderbecke, writes in ''Lost Chords,'' a gold mine of information on white jazzmen, many of whom deserve a better spotlight. Sudhalter's profiles of Beiderbecke, Emmett Hardy, Red Nichols, Artie Shaw, Jack Teagarden and Pee Wee Russell meld elegant musical analysis with a passion for the personalities and for how some artists managed to find personal harmonies despite the chasm of racial segregation.
There is, for example, a poignant account of the final years of Pee Wee Russell, who struggled with alcoholism and in his twilight years also became an abstract painter. In 1951, Sudhalter writes, ''a Life magazine photo, widely circulated at the time,'' showed Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden, ''concern etched on their faces, bending over the bedside of an emaciated, grievously ill Russell. What millions of Life readers didn't see was what editors had discreetly cropped out: a lit, half-smoked cigarette in the sick man's hand.''
The image of Armstrong, who rose from a ghetto to global celebrity, joining a white trombonist to visit a white clarinetist on his sickbed seems a cameo for Sudhalter's thesis of the ''interlocking roles'' of ethnic groups. How much social intercourse among musicians was there across the racial divide? Sudhalter cites some examples, like Jelly Roll Morton recording in Chicago with the white New Orleans Rhythm Kings in the 1920's; but his assimilationist theory of jazz comes off as a strained polemic.
''Jazz, says the now-accepted canon, is black: there have been no white innovators, few white soloists of real distinction,'' he writes. He quotes Barbara Tuchman on the temptations of judging one era by the standards of a later one and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. on the dangers of the ''noble lie'' in multiculturalism. Eminent historians, both -- but to what end? For the most part, Sudhalter does not attack the standard jazz histories or show them to be skewed. Instead, he personifies the ''black creationist canon'' in its alleged architect, the cultural critic Albert Murray. Sudhalter denounces Murray's celebrated 1976 book, ''Stomping the Blues,'' for ''the thesis, much discussed and written about in the 1920's, that what has come to be called jazz music is only an outgrowth, an extension, of the blues.'' But ''Stomping the Blues'' is a much more nuanced exploration of the blues as a cultural sensibility. Among other things, Murray draws a fascinating link between Saturday night dances fueled by a blues worldview and Sunday morning church services with rolling sermons and people swaying in pews -- a river flowing between secular haunts and sacred spaces. The role of religious memory in the black folkways that led to jazz does not fit Sudhalter's thesis. At one point, he casually remarks that spirituals are ''a tradition now known to be shared almost equally by black and white'' -- a stunning statement, if taken at face value.
Compositions are indeed a common cultural property, but performing styles can range so greatly as to alter the impact if not the meaning of many lyrics. The late-19th-century tours of the Fisk Jubilee Singers exposed white audiences in the United States and Europe to songs shaped by Christian witness through the experiences of slavery. Is that a tradition ''shared almost equally by black and white''? If indeed Sudhalter has a revisionist take on the spirituals, it is worth more than a sentence.
In the section on New Orleans, he writes: ''A growing body of research has now begun to place early accounts by all parties in an accurate temporal and factual matrix. . . . Such figures as the cornetist Buddy Bolden, once imbued with almost superhuman powers, have gradually been stripped of their veneer of legend.'' New Orleans in the early 1900's was quite a melting pot; however, it never would have been the birthplace of jazz had it not been for the fertile black culture that teemed with churches, street parades and funeral celebrations, a culture that gave voice to the stirrings of freedom and created a body of cultural memory.
Jazz arose from the march of African polyrhythm into European instrumentation and melody. Sicilian musicians like Nick LaRocca and Leon Roppolo, among other whites, advanced a line of New Orleans music that drew off brass band traditions. ''Interlocking roles'' suggests a parity of stylistic inventiveness among such players and Buddy Bolden, the hard-driving, bluesy cornet player who had a galvanizing effect on black dancers and paved the way for more illustrious players like the young Armstrong.
In one of his stranger assertions, Sudhalter cites Donald Marquis as one of several scholars responsible for ''the true history of New Orleans jazz'' that ''has begun to emerge.'' Marquis's 1978 biography, ''In Search of Buddy Bolden,'' disproved some colorful stories (like the notion that Bolden published a scandal sheet) but hardly unpeeled the ''veneer of legend.'' Subtitled ''The First Man of Jazz,'' the book endorsed Bolden's musical prowess and gave substance to the legend.
Had Sudhalter written a straightforward history of white jazzmen, he might well have made a contribution to the debate about culture and national identity. But his notion that each strand in the tapestry of jazz holds comparable weight devalues the genius of African polyphony, not to mention the powerful presence of black church music as a catalytic force in the early years.
Sudhalter is right to assert a role for white musicians in jazz history. If only he had used more light and less heat to make his case.
Jason Berry's books include ''Up From the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II.'' He is a jazz scholar at the Historic New Orleans Collection and is working on a history of brass band funerals.
My Response (The editor did not publish it, darn!)
July 13, 1999
The New York Times
229 West 43rd Street
New York NY 10836
Attention: Editor of Book Review
Dear Editor:
In my opinion, a book review of a non-fiction work must provide general information about the overall content of the book and an objective critique of the author’s approach, accuracy, completeness, etc. After reading Mr. Jason Berry’s review (Sunday Book Review 7/11/99) of Richard Sudhalter’s scholarly tome “Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945”, I only had a vague idea of the factual content of the book. Had I not read the book, I would have thought that the essence of the book was a political discourse about the relative importance of black and white contributions to jazz. I estimate that 90% of Mr. Berry’s review analyzes socio-political questions; less than 10% refers to the substantive content of the book. In contrast, Sudhalter’s book (890 + xxii pages) uses at least 98% of the space to provide biographies of several white jazz giants, technical analyses of the music they created (several transcriptions are included), commentaries by the author, bibliographic references and notes. I estimate that less than 1% of the space is devoted to the questions raised by Mr. Berry. Most of what Mr. Berry quotes and criticizes is taken from the 8-page introduction. The reader of the review is left in the dark (or at best in very dim light) as to the real essence of Sudhalter’s contribution.
Perhaps, had Mr. Berry ventured beyond the first few pages with an open mind, he would have realized that he was dealing with a masterpiece of jazz history that presents an accurate and highly technical analysis of the seminal contributions of white musicians to the development of jazz. “Lost Chords” is not an essay on the relative influence on jazz of black and white musicians. Rather, it is an account of the outstanding creativity of white jazz artists. As stated by Phillip D. Atteberry, Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh, in the April 1999 issue of The Mississippi Rag: " It is not possible, in a single review, to touch upon all the excellences of this book. Suffice to say that the chapters on Artie Shaw, Red Norvo and Mildred Bailey, Pee Wee Russell and Jack Teagarden are as intelligent and insightful as anything I've read on the topic. Most books embellish or refine an existing way of thinking. Only a few books prompt us to think in fundamentally new ways, to see a subject through an entirely new lens. “Lost Chords” is one of those rare books. It takes a large investment of time, but it's worth it. In most respects, this is a book that jazz lovers will never finish but will keep returning to as their listening trails expand." Obviously, Mr. Berry is unable, or unwilling, to view the history of jazz from a fresh point of view.
For readers who want an in-depth and balanced critique of Sudhalter’s book, I recommend the review by William H. Youngren in the February issue of Atlantic Monthly (available on the web at http://www.theatlantic.com/atlantic/issues/99feb/jazz.htm).