{"id":120658,"date":"2018-01-24T11:00:35","date_gmt":"2018-01-24T16:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=120658"},"modified":"2018-01-24T11:34:46","modified_gmt":"2018-01-24T16:34:46","slug":"when-jazz-was-dangerous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/24\/when-jazz-was-dangerous\/","title":{"rendered":"When Jazz Was Dangerous"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

\u201cRobinson\u2019s Band Plays Anything,\u201d F. Bildestein, 1890. From the cover of the New Orleans newspaper\u00a0the Mascot<\/em>\u00a0(November 15, 1890).<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Musical forms have the life cycle of carnivorous beasts: clumsy in infancy, terrifying in adolescence, fearsome in maturity, fangless in old age, and pitiful in senescence, before the inevitable silent death. Their life spans tend to be longer than ours, so it can be difficult to recall that some of the more geriatric genres were once vital and fierce. But even Baroque music had a caddish streak\u2014\u201ca most dangerous reef,\u201d in the words of a prominent seventeenth-century German rector, \u201calong which many a young soul, as if called by Sirens \u2026 falls into dissoluteness\u201d\u2014and polka, in the 1840s, was a venal Bohemian menace (in 1844, the\u00a0Illustrated London News\u00a0<\/em>wrote\u00a0that polka\u00a0\u201cneeds only to be seen once to be avoided forever!\u201d). Jazz, now well advanced into its second century, had an especially violent youth. It was more than merely dangerous\u2014it was homicidal.<\/p>\n

Jazz, to be precise, was never extraordinarily ferocious. \u201cJass\u201d was. The soft sibilant turned heavy at around the same time\u2014a century ago\u2014that the music crossed over in the national consciousness, rumbling north on steamboats up the Mississippi and on the northbound Illinois Central to Chicago, then to New York and California, where it swiftly gained popularity, social acceptance, critical esteem. To do so, it had to leave New Orleans, its native home, behind. This was understandable, given the treatment it had received.<\/p>\n

The Times-Picayune<\/em>, the official record of the city\u2019s white establishment, felt obliged to register its revulsion in an exuberantly\u00a0racist editorial published during the summer of 1918, entitled \u201cJass and Jassism.\u201d The music was a \u201cvice,\u201d like the \u201cdime novel\u201d and \u201cthe grease-dripping doughnut,\u201d the manifestation \u201cof a low streak in man\u2019s tastes that has not yet come out in civilization\u2019s wash. Indeed, one might go farther, and say that jass music is the indecent story syncopated and counter-pointed.\u201d Jass, that is to say, was sex rendered as music.<\/p>\n

Of course, you didn\u2019t need the syncopation or the counterpoint to figure this out. The lyrics of some of the most popular songs put it frankly, numbers like \u201cThe Whore\u2019s Gone Crazy,\u201d \u201cFunky Butt,\u201d \u201cThe Naked Dance,\u201d and \u201cCocaine Blues,\u201d which Jelly Roll Morton remembered going like this:<\/p>\n

I want a gal that works in the white folks\u2019 yard,
\nA pretty gal that works in the white folks\u2019 yard,
\nDo you see that fly crawling up the wall,
\nShe\u2019s going up there to get her ashes hauled.
\nI got a woman lives right back of the jail,
\nShe got a sign on her window\u2014Pussy For Sale.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The music was free, uncensorable, ecstatic\u2014qualities opposite to the way young African Americans in New Orleans were expected to comport themselves in public, at least by the readers of the Times-Picayune<\/em>. Such brazenness was alarming. The only solution, the editors concluded, was to choke the young music in its very cradle. The infanticide would be \u201ca point of civic honor,\u201d for \u201cits musical value is nil, and its possibilities of harm are great.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the moment, the anti-jassists appeared to have triumphed. By 1918, Jelly Roll Morton had moved to San Francisco; Buddy Bolden, the founding king of New Orleans jazz, had by then already spent a decade at the state insane asylum in Jackson, a hundred miles away; his successor King Oliver, who had worked as a butler to an uptown family while pioneering the new music, had fled to Chicago, where he was followed by many of his former bandmates; one of them, his eighteen-year-old student Louis Armstrong, left town the same year on a steamboat orchestra heading up the Mississippi. The previous year, the prostitution palaces of Storyville, reliable venues for early jazz musicians, had been outlawed, and the outbreak of the Spanish flu emptied the honky-tonks, country clubs, and dance halls. Those musicians who remained found work as painters, longshoremen, or manual laborers. Kid Ory was a carpenter. The bandleader Bab Frank ran restaurants. Alphonse Picou, composer of \u201cHigh Society,\u201d was a tinsmith.<\/p>\n

Many of the musicians lived in a neighborhood so rough it was known as the Battlefield. The streets were unpaved, strewn with broken glass, nails, oyster shells. The children, invariably, went barefoot. \u201cBut we were young, healthy and tough as old hell,\u201d Louis Armstrong wrote in his memoir\u00a0Satchmo<\/em>, \u201cso a little thing like lockjaw did not stay with us a long time.\u201d Once, as a young child, while playing in one of the abandoned, ramshackle buildings that served as jungle gyms for the neighborhood children, Armstrong was laid out by a slate tile that had fallen from the roof.<\/p>\n

It knocked me out cold and shocked me so bad I got lockjaw. When I was taken home Mama Lucy and Mayann worked frantically boiling up herbs and roots which they applied to my head. Then they gave me a glass of Pluto Water, put me to bed and sweated me out good all night long. The next morning I was on my way to school just as though nothing had happened.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But it was in these same streets that Armstrong, like so many musicians of his generation, heard the new sound\u2014in the second-line parades returning from the cemeteries; in the jangled tunes that junk collectors played on tinhorns; and from the ballyhoo wagons that carried bands through the streets, advertising boxing matches and dances and dueling with other wagons in \u201ccutting contests\u201d when they encountered each other, until the losing band was forced to retreat in shame. The windows to the honky-tonks and dance halls were left open to the street, so even a barefoote urchin could freely listen. If anything, the street audience was given priority: before a band went on stage, it was the custom for them to set up on the sidewalk and perform a free set for those walking by.<\/p>\n

A good way to chart the music\u2019s standing in New Orleans during this transitional period is through the story of the Axman, a madman who began hacking people to death in March 1918. The killer\u2019s motivation was murky at first. Most of his victims were Italian grocers and their wives, which may have had something to do with the fact that grocers lived in apartments attached to their stores and were thus easily accessible to a prowler. But the maniac also killed other innocent people, and by summer the randomness of the slaughters, paired with their brutality, had plunged the city into a state of panic. Dozens of suspected Axmen were arrested\u2014most of them black\u2014and released without charge; men fell asleep in chairs propped against their front doors, cradling loaded shotguns.<\/p>\n

The hysteria only subsided with the emergence of the Spanish flu, a far deadlier and more conniving serial killer. When the flu subsided in spring 1919, however, the Axman returned in full gore, slaughtering a grocer, his wife, and their infant child. Within a week, he sent a letter to the Times-Picayune<\/em>, making a startling admission: \u201cI am very fond of jazz music.\u201d<\/p>\n

Swearing \u201cby all the devils in the nether regions,\u201d the Axman announced that he would fly over New Orleans the following Tuesday night and murder anyone who wasn\u2019t listening to jazz. That there was a self-evident affinity between jazz fandom and ax killing was understood, the killings a logical manifestation of the music that the Times-Picayune<\/em> had described as an \u201catrocity.\u201d But the city\u2019s response to the letter indicated that attitudes were changing. That Tuesday night, there was no fear, only euphoria. Jazz music could be heard all over the city, not just in the Battleground but in the Garden District and from the millionaires\u2019 mansions on St. Charles Avenue. True to his word, the Axman spared the entire citizenry the ax.<\/p>\n

Near the end of his life, Louis Armstrong liked to say that jazz dissolved racial boundaries\u2014that, for at least the space of a song, even white bigots were romanced out of their hatred. \u201cThese same society people may go around the corner and lynch a Negro,\u201d he\u00a0told\u00a0Ebony<\/em> in 1961. \u201cBut while they\u2019re listening to our music, they don\u2019t think about trouble.\u201d It was trouble, though, that had given the music its life. When a music loses its danger, it succumbs to nostalgia, imitation, and charm, qualities of diminishing potency. It would take later generations to reinvigorate the form and, at least for a time, make it dangerous again. Miles Davis even scared himself; in his memoir, he wrote about what it was like when he first played with Coltrane: \u201cMan, the shit we were playing in a short time was scary, so scary that I used to pinch myself to see if I was really there.\u201d He understood what all great artists\u2014including the Axman himself, an artist of the serial murder\u2014understand, that anything truly new, in Jelly Roll Morton\u2019s phrase, puts a fear into the heart.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nathaniel Rich\u2019s third novel,\u00a0<\/em>King Zeno<\/a>, published this month. A former fiction editor of\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review, he\u00a0lives in New Orleans.<\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Musical forms have the life cycle of carnivorous beasts: clumsy in infancy, terrifying in adolescence, fearsome in maturity, fangless in old age, and pitiful in senescence, before the inevitable silent death. Their life spans tend to be longer than ours, so it can be difficult to recall that some of the more geriatric genres […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1371,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1187],"tags":[32664,28174,938,32661,32669,55,26807,14380,32659,32667,32663,330,32662,6535,6536,5823,1826,46,2541,32665,17303,6661,93,32666,179,24756,32668,32660,32657,32658,4037],"class_list":["post-120658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-music","tag-anti-jassists","tag-buddy-bolden","tag-chicago","tag-cocaine-blues","tag-coltrane","tag-dance","tag-danger","tag-fear","tag-funky-butt","tag-honky-tonks","tag-infanticide","tag-jazz","tag-jelly-roll-morton","tag-king-oliver","tag-louis-armstrong","tag-mississippi","tag-murder","tag-music","tag-new-orleans","tag-new-orleans-jazz","tag-race","tag-racism","tag-san-francisco","tag-second-line","tag-sex","tag-spanish-flu","tag-the-axman","tag-the-naked-dance","tag-the-times-picayune","tag-the-whores-gone-crazy","tag-vice"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhen Jazz Was Dangerous by Nathaniel Rich<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The early jazz scene was rough, sometimes dangerous, and an easy target for moralists. 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