V~riety
Pseudo - Folk
\\THE
folk tradition," Louise
Bogan writes in a recent issue
of
PARTISAN
REvmw, "has become
thoroughly bourgeoizified. At pres–
ent there is no way for the artist to
get at it, for it has been dragged
into a region where nothing living
or nutritious for his purposes ex–
ists." I want to extend this state–
ment, or at least to specify it, in
a few random notes.
Miss Bogan goes on to observe
that in jazz, "American folk has
never been more vigorous than at
this moment." I entirely share her
basic excitement over jazz and her
basic hopes for it, but I think it is
worth pointing out that roughly in
ratio to the relative richness of its
vigor, jazz has also suffered cor–
ruption. Even the best of it, I be–
lieve, has gone a long slope down–
ward into an ever more unsophisti–
cated sophistication, from the mid–
dle and late twenties to the pres–
ent, and its progress and decay has
the proliferant, geometrically in–
creasing, frightening celerity of a
galloping cancer. In 20 years,
though formally it has never suc–
cessfully transcended theme-and–
variation, it has in some other re–
spects covered roughly the ground
which composed Western music
took 400 years to go over. There
is hope, of course, in the fact that
all of these stages of jazz are still
operating.
If
you are lucky you can
still hear the oldest and purest kind
of boogywoogy (as against its Cafe
Society softenings and elabora–
tions). And you can still hear, in
the back country South and on the
best recorqs by Mitchell's Christian
Singers, the incunabular sort of
music which holds, to jazz, roughly
the relati6n which the first century
of sung polyphony holds to later
Western music, both religious and
secular. In street bands and in
dives, now and then, and now and
then for a moment on the "race
records" of little-known and un–
known musicians, you can hear
true lyric jazz at the point when
the deep-country and the town
have first fertilized each other, and
before imitation, ambition and the
possibility of earning much of any–
thing have destroyed it. But at the
same time you can hear Ellington
and understand why he is com–
pared to Delius, even if the com–
parison depresses rather than
pleases you; and you can hear
nasty, tricky little midgets like
Raymond Scott, "sophisticating"
this extremely sophisticated art out
of all relation to its source and, in
the same gestures, achieving a
op.ce-over-lightly loving-up betray–
al of the unaroused body of all
the rest of music. And you can see,
if you can stand it, the sort of peo–
ple who enjoy this sort of decay,
beside which men like Sinatra and
Crosby are very respectable folk–
artists indeed, being strictly, genu–
inely, sincerely and skilfully of
their special kind and class.
The quintessence of this special
kind of vicious pseudo-folk, in my
opinion, is Hazel Scott. She plays
the sort of jazz one could probably
pick up, by now, through a corres–
pondence school. She plays her
"classics" with a slobbering, anar–
chic, vindictive, rushing affectation
which any mediocre elementary
piano teacher would slap her silly
