T32
ROBERT COLES
classic blues, sung as formal entertainment rather than as an expression
of a person's private life or a people's social tragedy, and finally the
emergence of boogie-woogie, ragtime, and dixieland. Weare next led
through what the author calls "the modem scene." We see big-band
jazz marching to its death in the "watered-down slick 'white' com–
mercializations" of swing. We hear about the
separation
(die author
italicizes words like this) of the Negro musician from both white and
Negro middle-class culture. Beboppers restore jazz, but their
anti–
assimilationist
sounds antagonize white America; and the middle-class
Negro emulates his white "bossman" again, "trapped in the sinister
vapidity of mainline American culture." Finally, in the origin and
development of progressive and cool jazz, the white man comes into
his own-and jazz, of all things, is split into two mutually segregated
forms. Thus, the progressive jazz of Stan Kenton comes from a white,
upper-middle-class cerebral tradition, and cool jazz is most suitable
for "white musicians who favored a 'purity of sound' ... rather than
the rawer materials of dramatic expression." But the bebop of Charlie
Parker "re-established blues as the most important Afro-American form
in
Negro music."
Mr. Jones falters when he leaves this study of Negro music and
its various forms for extensive forays into history, sociology, psychology,
and ethical judgment of class values. For instance, he tells us that
narcotics users, and particularly heroin addicts, are really a rather
self-assured and aristocratic group. His incredible words are: "Heroin
is
the most popular addictive drug used by Negroes because ... the
drug itself transforms the Negro's normal separation from the main–
stream of the society into an advantage (which I have been saying I
think it is anyway) . It is one-upmanship of the highest order." Such
talk is nonsense of the highest order. The medical and psychiatric
agonies, the sickness and desperation of the addict, whether he is high,
low, or withdrawing, do not deserve such ill-informed sentimentality.
It
is ironic that this gifted young poet, bent on fighting middle–
class American culture in all its shabby superficiality, yields so willingly
to that very culture's most vulgar jargon, its narrowest, pseudo-socio–
logical mode of thinking. A writer who has written fine poetry to
honor Charlie Parker tells us in this book that "the verticality of the
city began to create two separate secularities, and the blues had to be
divided among them if it was going to survive at all." Scattered through
the book are phrases like "pseudo-autonomous existence" or sentences
like "The lateral exchange of cultural reference between black and
white produced an intercultural fluency."
