[Dixielandjazz] When 'Jazz' Was a Dirty Word - March 9, 2013

[Marek Boym]

This article brings back memories!
In 1959, Louis Armstrong played at the Mann Auditorium in Tel-Aviv.
But in Hebrew, the auditorium is called "Heyhal Hatarbut" - the
Plalace (or Temple) of Culture.
The day after the first concert, the Polish language Israeli daily
carried an article "Palace, aren't you sorry?" (a take-off on a Polish
folk song), in which Dr. Herzl Rozenblum berated the auditorium for
housin a concert which included "lyrical outbursts of drums," (quoting
from memory), etc.  That - in the days when Armstron was already
recognized worldwide and played the most prestigious venues in Europe
and America!
Cheers

On 11 March 2013 23:15, Robert Ringwald <rsr at ringwald.com> wrote:
> When 'Jazz' Was a Dirty Word
> The term made its debut exactly a century ago, but even jazz musicians long avoided
> using it
> by Terry Teachout
> Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2013
> Fire up the time machine, set the controls for New Orleans in 1907 and make your
> way to a rickety night spot on Perdido Street that is known to the locals as Funky
> Butt Hall. Look closely and you might see a child in short pants peering through
> a crack in the wall and listening to the band inside. The child is Louis Armstrong,
> and the band, a combo led by a cornet player named Buddy Bolden, is playing a brand-new
> style of music that sounds like a cross between ragtime and the blues.
> Don't call it "jazz," though, because nobody in Funky Butt Hall will know what you're
> talking about. They call it "ragtime." And don't try to tell them that it will someday
> be played in concert halls, because if you do, they'll laugh you off the dance floor.
> Bolden's band played background music for bumping, grinding, drinking and fighting.
> Nobody in New Orleans thought of it as art, and nobody would think of it that way
> for years to come. Well into the '60s, there were still plenty of skeptics who continued
> to question the musical worth of jazz, and one of the reasons for their persistent
> skepticism was the fact that it had been born in honky tonks with names like Funky
> Butt Hall.
> The word "jazz" didn't appear in print with any frequency until March 1913, exactly
> a century ago. What's more, it doesn't seem to have had anything to do with music,
> nor was the word coined in New Orleans. It was used by baseball players and sportswriters
> in California as a synonym for "enthusiasm." By 1915 it was also being used to refer
> to improvised dance music. Two years after that, a five-piece ragtime combo from
> New Orleans cut a record whose label identified it as the "Original Dixieland 'Jass'
> Band." From then on the word (whose spelling soon became regularized) was permanently
> attached to the music.
> For many years afterward, it was widely assumed, apparently incorrectly, that the
> word "jazz" derived from a similar-sounding slang word that initially meant "energy"
> but started to be used around the turn of the century as a vulgar term for seminal
> fluid. Because Storyville, New Orleans's notorious red-light district, was one of
> the very first places where jazz was played, both the word and the music itself came
> to be widely seen as socially disreputable, a sentiment that persisted for decades.
> And while many whites saw jazz as a black music and held it in contempt for that
> reason alone, the belief that it was a lower-class music was equally common among
> status-conscious middle-class blacks.
> Nor has that belief entirely died out. To this day, Duke Ellington, one of the greatest
> composers of the 20th century, is the only jazz musician ever to have received the
> NAACP's Spingarn Medal, which recognizes "the highest or noblest achievement by an
> American Negro during the preceding year or years." The decision to single out a
> jazzman for such high honors in 1959 was a source of intense controversy. The Los
> Angeles Tribune, a prominent black newspaper of the day, editorialized as follows:
> "Lord knows, we love [Ellington's] music, but its sexy growls and moans have never
> moved us to go out and register to vote, or bowl over a bastion of prejudice."
> This helps to explain why Ellington, who came from a middle-class family, refused
> to call his music jazz. "I don't write jazz," he said. "I write Negro folk music."
> In 1965, the year in which Ellington was passed over for a well-deserved Pulitzer
> Prize, he complained to Nat Hentoff that most Americans "still take it for granted
> that European music -- classical music, if you will -- is the only really respectable
> kind... jazz [is] like the kind of man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate
> with." Charles Mingus, another great black jazzman, felt much the same way: "To me
> the word 'jazz' means nigger, discrimination, second-class citizenship, the whole
> back-of-the-bus bit."
> But the power and beauty of jazz finally won over its detractors, and today it is
> regarded throughout the world as a form of high art that is directly comparable in
> seriousness and significance to classical music. Not only is jazz played in concert
> halls and taught in the public schools, but it's increasingly used in films, TV shows
> and ads as a cultural signifier, an infallible indicator of upper-middle-class hipness.
> Will etymologists and musicologists look back on the later controversy over rock
> 'n' roll -- whose name, unlike the word "jazz," originally had unambiguous sexual
> connotations -- with similar bemusement? That's anyone's guess. But Louis Armstrong
> would likely have approved of jazz's latter-day status as an art music. "I mean,
> you don't just go around waking people up to the effect of saying, 'You know, this
> music is art,'" he said in 1965. "But it's got to be art because the world has recognized
> our music from New Orleans, else it would have been dead today." So it has, and so
> it is.
> __________
> Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, is the author of "Duke: A Life of Duke
> Ellington," out this fall from Gotham Books.
> -30-
>
>
> -Bob Ringwald
> www.ringwald.com
> Amateur (ham) Radio Operator K6YBV
> 916/ 806-9551
>
> "My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference.”
> Harry S. Truman, 33rd President B: 5/8/1884 – d: 12/26/1972.
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