This article was downloaded by: [University of North Texas] On: 06 October 2013, At: 22:40 Publisher: Routledge

Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Jazz Perspectives
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjaz20

New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History

Burton Peretti
a a

Western Connecticut State University, Danbury, CT Published online: 23 Mar 2011.

To cite this article: Burton Peretti (2010) New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History, Jazz Perspectives, 4:3, 369-372, DOI: 10.1080/17494060.2010.561095 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17494060.2010.561095

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the Content) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions

Jazz Perspectives Vol. 4, No. 3, December 2010, pp. 369372

Book Review
New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History. By Bruce Boyd Raeburn. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-472-11675-1 (cloth); 9780-472-03321-8 (paper). Pp. 352. $70 (cloth); $26.95 (paper).
Jazz 10.1080/17494060.2010.561095 RJAZ_A_561095.sgm 1749-4060 Original Taylor 2011 0 3 4 bperetti@yahoo.com BurtonPeretti 00000DECEMBER Perspectives & and Article Francis (print)/1749-4079 Francis 2010 (online)

Today no one ever questions that jazz found its first welcome roost in New Orleans in the 1900s and 1910s. The more absolute and long-popular claim that jazz was born in New Orleanswhile a claim still held dear by promoters of the citynow engenders a bit more skepticism, especially among jazz scholars, but in their references to early jazz especially, popular histories and scholarship still avow the Crescent Citys centrality. Like most historical assumptions that become foundational ideas in textbooks, though, the shibboleth that proclaims New Orleans pride of place as a jazz locale itself has a historyit was constructed through an accumulation of interpretations. The concept was the intellectual product of critics, historians, record collectors, and musicians who, in the decades before 1950, debated the nature of jazz and its origins. Bruce Boyd Raeburn, curator of the William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University, seems to be too proud a New Orleanian to contend that the notion of the citys early prominence is a myth, or at least a truism, but his detailed and compelling new book demonstrates how the idea resulted from a complex and often messy discourse, a progression of arguments that was an artifact of the national culture of the 1930s and 1940s. As the books title indicates, Raeburn locates the rise of New Orleans jazz reputation in the evolution of the musics historiography. Early chapters show that in the 1910s and 1920s, New Orleans newspaper writers set the tone by denying the citys paternity of a musical style they despised, and that up north, critics and other observers rarely pondered the question of jazzs historical origins. Raeburn identifies Charles Edward Smiths essay of 1930, Jazz: Some Little Known Aspectspublished in The Symposiumas the trailblazing argument in favor of a New Orleans genealogy for jazz. Smith additionally publicized musicians distinctions between commercialized sweet jazzheretofore misidentified as the mainstream of the formand hot jazz, the musicians improvisational art that derived from New Orleans style. The notion of jazz as art, Raeburn shows, actually was developed by other critics later in the 1930s, but not without challenges from the school of thought (dominant then in Paris) that stressed hot jazzs alleged identity as a primitive folk music. The Symposium was politically left-wing and representative of the cultural radicalism that emerged during the Great Depression, and thus Smiths essay also initiated the tradition of describing jazz as a proletarian music. As Raeburn notes (25), Smith exhibited confusion over the roles of white and black musicians, North and South, in early jazz; in this sense as well, he foreshadowed the same confusion in later jazz writing. At the end of the decade, the
ISSN 17494060 print/17494079 online 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17494060.2010.561095

Downloaded by [University of North Texas] at 22:40 06 October 2013

370

Book Review

culmination of much of this writing was Jazzmen, a history of jazz co-edited by Smith and Frederick Ramsey Jr., which offered detailed research and a synoptic story of the music from its 1800s origins to the Swing Era. Raeburn argues that Jazzmen offers an apotheosis of the story of jazzs origins in New Orleans, which remains a dominant paradigm in jazz historiography. The other element Raeburn emphasizes in the emergence of the New Orleans thesis in jazz history is the role of the record collector. The mania in the 1930s with which some young, reasonably privileged, and well-educated white men threw themselves into the hunt for rare disks and arcane discographical information fueled a new search for origins and progenitors in jazz, as well as a new obsession with jazz minutiae and quasi-anthropological field work amidst forgotten, usually poor and African American, early jazz musicians. Here Raeburn follows suggestively the path of Krin Gabbard, whose 2001 essay, Revenge of the Nerds: Black Jazz Artists and Their White Shadows, explores the psychological dimensions of the collectors attitude, a particular variety of middle-class, white masculine obsession.1 This collectors attitude contributed to the development of a full-fledged purist mentality, which Raeburn argues drove the valorization of New Orleans as the cradle of jazz. This purism, he also claims, had established hegemony over jazz scholarship by 1942. (151) Later in the decade, though, the famous jazz critics war broke out between traditionalists and modernists, and members of the latter groupsuch as Leonard Feathersought to reassert the New York-oriented, forward-looking values of most 1920s jazz writing. Nevertheless, as Raeburn shows, through the ministrations of Smith, Ramsey, and especially the indefatigable William Russell, the New Orleans origination-cum-purism narrative continued to thrive, in intensive research in the city and in a worldwide cult of Dixieland preservationism. As the current custodian of the archive that Russell largely built, Raeburn predictably pays it a great deal of respect, but he also perceptively laments how the purist mystique has eclipsed generations of innovative post-Dixieland musicians in the city. This synopsis gives a sense of the breadth and richness of Raeburns topic, which bursts the levees of New Orleanss sociomusical terrain, so to speak, to take in wide swaths of the intellectual and cultural history of the 1930s and 1940s. His research into early jazz publications and histories and his explication of the intellectual contexts of the era are particular strengths of the study. Students of early jazz, though, might find the book wanting in some curious ways. It might be churlish to expect that a curator might exploit his unmatched knowledge of his own archive to present a passel of new data, but I still find that Raeburn underutilizes the riches of the Hogan collection. The first quotation from one of the hundreds of oral history synopses produced by Russells team appears on p. 222, in a disappointing concluding chapter that tardily relates New Orleanss own slow discovery of its jazz heritage. The synopses are used to relate information on some 1920s bands, while the method of the oral history project is described
1 Krin Gabbard, Revenge of the Nerds: Black Jazz Artists and Their White Shadows, in Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls: Gender in Film at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. Murray Pomerance (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 233247.

Downloaded by [University of North Texas] at 22:40 06 October 2013

Jazz Perspectives 371

only briefly, in a couple of pages later in the chapter. While many other studies retell the musical history of the city, it is surprising that early historians findings (as opposed to their intellectualizing) receive so little description here. This is symptomatic of the fact that Raeburn only provides the most general portraits of Russell, Smith, Ramsey, and other major figures in his narrative. Their ideas are presented effectively, but the pioneering research done for Jazzmen (as well as by John and Alan Lomax in the same general region) is only summarized, as are some of their later investigations in New Orleans (plus Russells, Al Roses, and Richard B. Allens moves to the city). Surely the Hogan archive contains more important detail about their early careers, which, it is fair to say, laid the foundation for a half-century of historiography on New Orleans jazz. Conversely, Raeburn revisits in great detail the well-known stories of the purists rediscovery of Willie Bunk Johnson and their battle in the late 1940s with the modernist jazz critics. This lengthy narrative inevitably contains some valuable new datasuch as the purists concomitant resuscitation of Kid Orys careerbut it generally treads over familiar territory. Similarly, Raeburn takes great care to tease out the ideas advanced by both sides in the critical battle, particularly over the value of New Orleans traditionalism and purism. Despite the rich context in which he places these ideas, his detailed discussion largely serves to confirm my long-held impression that writers on both sides largely were not intellectuals but poseurs, or even pseudointellectuals. Rudi Blesh, Leonard Feather, George Avakian, John Hammond, and others yielded to no one in their advocacy of various forms of jazz, but they lacked the broader cultural and critical apparatus to make valuable arguments about the merits of the music and its relevance to society during and immediately after World War II. Their posturing during the critics war did the music they loved little service, andto return to Raeburns subjectbarely advanced jazz historiography. (The muddle they created over the issue of race in jazz was especially unhelpful.) The characterizing of early jazz enthusiasts and collectors as intellectuals leads Raeburn on occasion to pay far too much mind to their tactical jabs at the opposition. To return to the preceding decade, Raeburn is more successful in arguing that Smith and Ramseys Jazzmen of 1939 established a brief consensus about jazz history, which held until the critics war. As I noted, the research behind the New Orleans chapters of Jazzmen deserves more attention than it receives here. In addition, though, the books larger argument might deserve a closer look. Raeburn claims, correctly I believe, that the foundational-origins theory [pertaining to New Orleans] in Jazzmen holds up pretty well (5), but it is also worth stressing that the contributors located origins elsewhere as well. William Russell argued that jazz piano style, specifically boogie-woogie, originated far from New Orleans (184), and Wilder Hobson, among other contributors, found virtually no New Orleans influence in early New York jazz before Louis Armstrongs tenure with the Fletcher Henderson orchestra. These are well-known and accurate arguments, but the point is that they constitute as sizeable a portion of Jazzmens argument as does the notion of New Orleans-as-foundation. I remain unconvinced, at least on the basis of Raeburns presentation, that Ramsey and Smith (and Russell) were the first writers to take jazzs origins in New Orleans seriously, and that it was the prime goal of Jazzmen to elevate New Orleanss status as the cradle of

Downloaded by [University of North Texas] at 22:40 06 October 2013

372

Book Review

Downloaded by [University of North Texas] at 22:40 06 October 2013

jazz. Similarly, as John Hammond noted in his autobiography and many others have shown as well, the activities of 1930s record collectors were likely to privilege northern jazz players, simply because most recording studios and companies were based above the Ohio River; for New Orleanss reputation, I suspect, the collectors mania proved to be a double-edged sword today. (Finally, it is de rigeur in 2010 to note that many women played jazz, even in early New Orleans, and that writers such as Raeburn take a risk in following Smiths and Ramseys 70-year-old use of the term jazzmen.) None of these criticisms, though, should deter interested readers from the many valuable facts and observations in New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History. Raeburn succeeds especially in rendering the intellectual environment surrounding the rise of an obsessive class of young, white, and sometimes politically left-wing males who cobbled together the mainstream of jazzs history. He also encourages us to want to know more about figures such as Charles Edward Smith and William Russell and their relationship with a city whose culture and music, then and now, were both engulfing and maddeningly elusive to outsiders. New Orleanss highly ambivalent relationship to jazz preservationism, which was only heightened by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is well conveyed here, and provides a trove of other topics which jazz scholars can explore, using Raeburns book as their initial guide. Burton Peretti Western Connecticut State University, Danbury, CT