Let academicians claim a term for use in their endless categorizing, and there’s no telling what kind of paradoxes will arise. Take “modern,” for instance. Supposedly a simple adjective meaning contemporary or up-to-date, the professors have turned it into Modernism, and voila! — somehow it describes a historical period in art and literature between the years 1920 and 1950. Of course, the most talented Modernists realized that the cozy Victorian notion of a timeline of “progress,” offering ever-greater material comfort, tolerance, and opportunity, was literally exploded by World War I. Instead of trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, artists like Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi — and writers such as Joyce, Pound, and Faulkner — took the scattered pieces of Western culture and put them together according to their own visions.
Anyone who has puzzled over Joyce’s Ulysses or Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, or stared at cubist and abstract art from every angle looking for something recognizable, knows the feeling: “I know this stuff is supposed to provide me with enlightenment, but why do they make it so hard?” It often seems that no one without a liberal arts higher education is going to find the holy grail of “hidden meaning.”
But there may be hope for the person in the street after all. Alfred Appel Jr., in his new book Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce, believes he’s discovered a back entrance to truly accessible modernism — the jazz of the great African American masters, Louis Armstong, Fats Waller, and Duke Ellington.
Jazz Modernism has many of the superficial characteristics of a “coffee table book,” beautiful art reproductions and a substantial weight of slick paper, but the front cover denies it any chance to lie harmlessly in front of the living room couch. You get Louis Armstrong in full blow, cheeks inflated, eyes popping out, a little scary before you realize what you’re looking at — which must have been the intended effect. Appel sees the great jazz artists as having a vision as radical and sophisticated as their white modernist counterparts. Yet, because they had to compose and perform in the grossly racist society of America in the modernist period, the true subtlety and power of their art has to be “interpreted.” Once Appel cleans away the layers of encrusted stereotypes, the jazz greats emerge as fully the peers of the guys being studied in university literature and art appreciation classes.
One shouldn’t expect a standard college lecture from Appel, needless to say. He is riffing from the beginning, leaping from point to point like a jazz soloist’s improvisation, punning and alluding constantly. His major point comes across pretty clearly, though. Jazz artists took the music they found lying around, broke it down and reconstructed it on the fly, just as Picasso could turn “found” objects into collages and sculptures and Joyce could parody every form of English writing style from Shakespeare to newspaper journalism.
Ironically, Appel sees Armstrong and Ellington’s most effective modernist transformations springing from material that’s otherwise cliched or stereotypical. When Armstrong sings that “standard of standards,” “Stardust,” he tosses out the tired, Victorian-sounding “memory of love’s refrain” in the last phrase of the chorus and just sings, “oh memory, memory, memory,” adding a depth of feeling and sensitivity that the original words hardly hint at. Appel sees Ellington’s so-called “jungle music” of his Cotton Club period paralleling the “Africanized” paintings of Picasso and Matisse. Ellington’s use of dark minor harmonies and classical quotations in his arrangements provide a knowing nod to the listener who can grasp the undercurrent of tragedy and anger in the growling plunger solos on “Black and Tan Fantasy,” complete with a quotation from Chopin’s “Funeral March.”
Jazz Modernism offers a rich mix of visual stimulation in its illustrations, and Appel’s style forces the reader to flip back and forth constantly between the text and visuals, giving the whole experience of reading something of a “hypertext” dimension. My favorite juxtaposition of illustrations occurs right in the middle of the book, where a beautiful, austere Walker Evans photograph called “Negro Church, South Carolina” faces a photo of a Picasso “found” sculpture of 1958, entitled “Man.” The two constructions use almost exactly the same elements of golden rectangle and triangle to express the essence of the human form. To me, these two pictures identify the core of Appel’s enterprise, to demonstrate how necessary art has become to discover the essence of human spirituality in an era determined to deny that essence through every institution of intellect and politics.
This article appears in Jan 1-7, 2003.
