Shining Trumpets, a History of Jazz
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| "When a serious composer praises jazz music or even swing, it is unbiased praise, for jazz is the music without formal, written scores, composed by the players in the playing, while swing is the field in which the arranger is of much greater importance than the composer." --''[[Shining Trumpets, a History of Jazz]]'' (1946) by Rudi Blesh | "When a serious composer praises jazz music or even swing, it is unbiased praise, for jazz is the music without formal, written scores, composed by the players in the playing, while swing is the field in which the arranger is of much greater importance than the composer." --''[[Shining Trumpets, a History of Jazz]]'' (1946) by Rudi Blesh | ||
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| + | [[Swing music|Swing]] is a reactionary music which sacrifices the truly modem tendencies of polyphonic jazz. And the swing techniques are largely mythical Dexterity is less than a complete technique. It utilizes the obviously impressive while avoiding the unspectacular, truly difficult things, especially those requiring a genuine melodic and rhythmic creativeness. The present-day solo is esteemed modern and full of ideas in direct proportion to the more unrecognizable it makes the melody. Such "getting off 5 * conceals lack of true invention or the ability to produce logical variation. | ||
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| + | Swing has been no more modern than styles in women's clothing are modern. Its ceaseless search for novelty, rather than the truly original, has kept it faddishly changing, hectically striving to avoid being out-of-date. It has had from this an euphoric illusion of progress. As a result however while jazz remains modern and in advance of the times swing has steadily deteriorated and is now reaching a nauseous state of disintegration more and more apparent to the public. Its champions are being slowly discredited. It has degenerated during the last five years into the extreme forms of its two categories, sweet and hot. The former has become a completely devitalized, sentimental, hodgepodge of [[Tin Pan Alley]] ditty, and the Romantic and Impressionistic types of European music. In theatrical terms it is a tear-jerker. Large string sections are added by bands like that of Tommy Dorsey or even by a once quasi-hot group like that of Basie." --''[[Shining Trumpets, a History of Jazz]]'' (1946) by Rudi Blesh, p. 289 | ||
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"Herein lies the importance, in a cultural and historical sense, of the phonograph record to jazz, more vital than the printed score to Western music."--Shining Trumpets, a History of Jazz (1946) by Rudi Blesh "When a serious composer praises jazz music or even swing, it is unbiased praise, for jazz is the music without formal, written scores, composed by the players in the playing, while swing is the field in which the arranger is of much greater importance than the composer." --Shining Trumpets, a History of Jazz (1946) by Rudi Blesh Swing is a reactionary music which sacrifices the truly modem tendencies of polyphonic jazz. And the swing techniques are largely mythical Dexterity is less than a complete technique. It utilizes the obviously impressive while avoiding the unspectacular, truly difficult things, especially those requiring a genuine melodic and rhythmic creativeness. The present-day solo is esteemed modern and full of ideas in direct proportion to the more unrecognizable it makes the melody. Such "getting off 5 * conceals lack of true invention or the ability to produce logical variation. Swing has been no more modern than styles in women's clothing are modern. Its ceaseless search for novelty, rather than the truly original, has kept it faddishly changing, hectically striving to avoid being out-of-date. It has had from this an euphoric illusion of progress. As a result however while jazz remains modern and in advance of the times swing has steadily deteriorated and is now reaching a nauseous state of disintegration more and more apparent to the public. Its champions are being slowly discredited. It has degenerated during the last five years into the extreme forms of its two categories, sweet and hot. The former has become a completely devitalized, sentimental, hodgepodge of Tin Pan Alley ditty, and the Romantic and Impressionistic types of European music. In theatrical terms it is a tear-jerker. Large string sections are added by bands like that of Tommy Dorsey or even by a once quasi-hot group like that of Basie." --Shining Trumpets, a History of Jazz (1946) by Rudi Blesh, p. 289 |
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Shining Trumpets, a History of Jazz (1946) is a book by Rudi Blesh. The disparaging passage on "Ellington's 'tea dansant music' is often cited.
The work is referenced in This is Pop (2004) edited by Eric Weisbard.
'Tea dansant' excerpts
"Another Rollini record, Weather Man (1935), in which the white trumpeter Mannone and others participate in a mixed white and Negro group, makes abortive attempts at improvised ensemble polyphony in the New Orleans manner, but is intelligible only in the solos. The whole is at a rather plodding swing tempo and in a romanticized tea dansant vein."
"Ellington's fame is now such that he gives Carnegie Hall concerts of a swing completely divorced from dance function, a tea dansant music trapped out with his borrowed effects from jazz, the Impressionists, and the French Romantics. Some hail him as a foremost genius of modern music, a few lament that "the Duke has forsaken jazz." Both are wrong: the laurels of Hindemith, Stravinsky, and Bartok are safe and, as for jazz, the Duke has never played it."
Blurb
"The whole noisy, exciting, and bespangled history of jazz is in this book. Here are the African backgrounds, the tentative beginnings of an American art in the Delta and New Orleans, the garishly colored heyday of the true New Orleans style, and the stories of the great jazz creators from that day to this. Written by a man who loves his subject, who knows music thoroughly, and who has studied his scenes and characters at first hand, Shining Trumpets is a fascinating and variegated story. Mr. Blesh does not miss any important musical or sociological implications: he has produced a book that is simultaneously a solid, serious history and a controversial piece of advocacy. Here is a whole central aspect of twentieth-century life in the United States told from the inside, and with all its surging vitality and down-to-earthness. No book like it has appeared before."--Dust jacket.
