Music Instruction & Education, Jazz, General & Miscellaneous Literary Criticism

Jazz Modernism

Name: Jazz Modernism
Author: Alfred Appel
ISBN: 9780394533933

by Alfred Appel

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Overview

"How does the jazz of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, and Charlie Parker fit into the great tradition of the modern arts between 1920 and 1950? In Jazz Modernism, one of our finest cultural historians provides the answer." Alfred Appel, author of The Annotated Lolita ("superb...full of vigor, gems, and stratagems" - Vladimir Nabokov), compares the layering of sex, vitality, and the vernacular in jazz with the paper collages of Picasso, and the vital mix of high and low culture found in Joyce. He shows how the musical construct of jazz was pared down by the masters as sculpture was in Calder's hands or prose in Hemingway's. He makes clear how Armstrong and Waller tore apart and rebuilt Tin Pan Alley material in the way that modernists in the visual arts arrived at wood assemblage and scrap-metal sculpture. He enables us to see that Ellington's "jungle" style was as un-primitive as Brancusi's self-conscious Africanesque sculpture. And along the way, he "recalls" live jazz performances during the 1950s by Armstrong and John Coltrane, among others, and the night Charlie Parker played to a visibly thrilled Igor Stravinsky at Birdland.

About the Author, Alfred Appel

Alfred Appel, Jr., is Professor Emeritus of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Annotated Lolita (which has been in print since 1970), Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, Signs of Life, and The Art of Celebration. He has been the recipient of Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships. Appel lives in Wilmette, Illinois.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

What do Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington have to do with James Joyce and Pablo Picasso? A lot, if you buy Appel's argument in this erudite but misguided analysis of the classical jazz era (1920-1950). Appel's goal, he states up front, is to locate jazz "in the great modernist tradition in the arts." He traces jazz influences through dozens of famous masterpieces, from the colorful rhythms of Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie to the "rat-a-tat-tat" dialogue of Hemingway's short story "The Killers." Appel's most intriguing analysis comes when he breaks down the "syncopated prose" of Molly Bloom's famous soliloquy in Ulysses to find that it clocks in at a jazz-like 86 beats per minute (doubling in tempo at the end, in true bebop fashion). These are interesting if familiar examples of white artists borrowing from their black jazz counterparts. But Appel (Signs of Life) is less successful in showing that these influences ran the other way in some cases, he resorts to somewhat dubious connections. How helpful is it, for example, to say that Armstrong's scat vocalizations evoke "grotesquely sprung eyeballs in Picasso's preliminary drawings for Guernica"? Or that Fats Waller and his band embodied the "black flame" in an obscure Matisse painting? Appel is generally more persuasive when his evidence is specific, as in one extended passage where he meticulously documents how Waller undermined the black minstrel songs white audiences expected him to perform. Despite Appel's tendency to stretch material to fit his thesis, his book is an illuminating tour through some of the 20th century's great artistic achievements. Illus. (Sept. 19) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Appel (English, emeritus, Northwestern Univ.) takes the reader on a dizzying spin through the music of Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, and (not quite enough of) Duke Ellington, along with a few others. His thoughts alternately flow and then snap off abruptly in new, unexpected directions sort of a jazz-based, interdisciplinary course on the aesthetics of modernism on speed. While the occasional puns and sudden shifts in imagery might teeter on the edge of favoring style over in-depth analysis, there is enough musical meat to satisfy casual jazz fans and jazz fanatics alike. Appel's near-improvisatory writing will not be every reader's cup of "Tea for Two," but the chapter on Waller's modernistic approach as a singer particularly in his send-ups of inane pop tunes is dead on. The uncharacteristically straight-to-the-point comparisons of boogie woogie with the later paintings of Piet Mondrian and Appel's tasty deconstruction of Louis Armstrong's vocal stylings also pull the listener into hearing (and seeing and appreciating) in new ways. Highly recommended for academic libraries having a strong focus on music and/or aesthetics, this would also make a nice, although perhaps not essential, addition to public libraries. James E. Perone, Mount Union Coll., Alliance, OH Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.