Appropriate Falsehoods: English Poets and American Jazz
1987; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 17; Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3507651
ISSN2222-4289
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
ResumoAdrian Mitchell's celebrated couplet defines a minority response, at least as far as English poets who claim an interest in jazz are concerned. They may not agree with Philip Larkin's even more celebrated anathematizing of the three Ps (Parker, Pound, and Picasso) but on the whole their devotion is given to the so-called traditional styles and masters, and for most of them 'modern jazz' is a contradiction in terms. The music of New Orleans and Chicago, of Armstrong, Beiderbecke, Condon, Ellington, Ory, and Waller, this is what jazz means for those predominantly middle-class, universityeducated poets who, during the I940s and I950s, proclaimed their devotion in prose and verse. I want to offer some suggestions as to why this should be so, but before I do it will be as well to say something about the reputation of jazz in pre-war England. The year to begin with is 1919. Before then there had been talk of 'ragtime', but I do not think that anyone had much sense of what that word really meant, and since they had little more to go on than Irving Berlin's 'Alexander's Ragtime Band' this is not very surprising. What does seem to be true is that during the war years, 1914-18, army officers home on leave or due to be sent out to the Western Front included among their diversions regular attendance at dinner-dances; at such dinner-dances, interspersed with the newly-fashionable and 'shocking' tango, and other, rather more acceptable, dance-music, there would be an occasional bow in the direction of'ragtime'. This seems to have meant up-tempo numbers with a fairly solid four-to-the-bar rhythm which, considering that most orchestras were largely composed of violinists, must have sounded pretty excruciating.1 Then, in i919, the Original Dixieland Jazz (or Jass) Band came to England. 'Untuneful Harmonists playing Peppery Melodies', as they rather oddly styled themselves, they produced what has been called a 'phenomenal
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