Here Tomorrow
THE literature about jazz is growing to formidable proportions; yet the books still tend to fall into one or two categories. Either they are gossip about personalities, which may or may not be anthro- pologically interesting; or, if they are about music, they are highly specialised, addressed to initiates. There has been singularly little directed at the cultivated amateur : the man who—whether or not he has any training in music—is interested in jazz, along with other contemporary arts, because it is irrefutably part of the world we live in and has proved that, whatever its 'value,' it is at least more than ephemeral.
Francis Newton's book is addressed to this less specialised public; and should be read by anyone who thinks art matters in a relatively mechanised society and still more, perhaps, by those who think it doesn't. For Mr. Newton traces the relationship between the sociological and musical aspects of. jazz, stressing its importance as a creative manifestation distinct from Euro- pean art music. It is an urbanisation of what one might call the 'philosophical' approach and of the techniques of folk music; and this remains true even though it bears an equivocal relation to the synthetic music-manufacture of Tin Pan Alley. In some ways, Mr. Newton suggests, jazz depends on the commercial world for its survival : while being in its creative essence at the extreme pole from commerce, since it is above all spon- taneous activity, an improvisatory art of doers, and is in addition a music of protest and of tough reality rather than of the Hollywooded daydream. The initial protest of the American Negro against oppression becomes a symbol of the city dweller's rootlessness and isolation : in particular of the directionless uncertainty of urban youth.
Mr. Newton's book makes sense, a pattern, out of the vagaries of jazz evolution from blues and the New Orleans band to the arty sophistica- tion of Gil Evans. It is acute in its analysis of jazz's social significance, modest in its appraisal of the music's artistic achievement. And I've read Mr. Newton's book with a personal sense of gratitude : for he has shown me why, as a com- poser, I've long been fascinated by jazz while knowing little about it and not greatly liking the music I did know. I disagree with Mr. Newton on only one minor matter : I believe that the affinity between Stravinsky (alone among European 'art' composers) and jazz goes much deeper than he suggests, and that this has some- thing to do with the in many ways non-European nature of Stravinsky's techniques.
WILFRID MELLERS
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