Jazz Flayed

If there is such a thing as a music critic in journalism, Ernest Newman of the London Sunday Times is the man. Two winters ago, readers of the New York Evening Post were treated to his pungent, piercing comments during several months that he spent as guest critic with that newspaper (TIME, Oct. 13, 1924, et seq.). During those same months, Critic Newman was treated to a close-range view of the great U. S. pastime of discovering profound significance in artistry previously considered crude, slapstick or otherwise lowly--Charles Chaplin, Ring Lardner, Harlem, George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman.

Paul Whiteman and other jazzers have been in Europe for the past summer. Many Europeans, especially in Paris and London, are almost prepared to forgive the U. S. its debt-collection sins out of gratitude and admiration for its swooning, crooning, blaring, diddling, wailing, jumping, honking, twanging dance music. It helps them forget their taxes.

Naturally, there have clustered together little groups of serious European thinkers to make the same discovery that Americans have made, that Jazz is a great art form. So, since that sort of thing makes him sick, Critic Ernest Newman last week had at it bitterly in his London Sunday Times, saying:

"Jazzists make a great point of their rhythmic innovations and the freedom of their rhythms. If they had any idea of what rhythm meant, they would know that in comparison with the rhythms of any of the great composers from the 16th Century onwards their own rhythms are merely as the sing-song of a nursery rhyme to the changing subtleties of a page of Shakespeare.

"Your typical jazz composer, or jazz enthusiast, is merely a musical illiterate who is absurdly pleased with little things because he does not know how little they are. Had he any knowledge of history he would know that all that is now happening in jazz happened many centuries ago in vocal music, and that the end in the present case will be the same as in the earlier one.

"Jazz, in fact, is on the horns of a dilemma. You cannot have music without composers and at present jazz has no composers in the full sense of the term. The brains of the whole lot of them put together would not fill the lining of Johann Strauss's hat.

"At present jazz is not an art but an industry, the whirring of a standardized machine endlessly turning out a standardized article. There is no hope of salvation for it until a real composer takes it up and no real composer would touch it because it is too feeble and limited an instrument of expression for anyone who has anything to express.

"The thing is already dead from the neck up. That it will remain popular for some time among the musical illiterate is quite possible and if the dancers like it there is no reason why they should not have it. But the day has gone by when musicians can even take a languid interest in the thing, for musical people it is now the last word in brainlessness and boredom.

"What should we say of a man who would undertake to make Shakespeare acceptable to the masses by rewriting him in the language of a New York east-sider. For 'To be, or not to be: that is the question,' let us say 'Yer for it or yer ain't, j'get me kid.'

"Mr. Whiteman's ideas on this subject indeed are illuminative. He would not have 'Onward Christian Soldiers' jazzed because this is a 'sturdy majestic tune with a religious connection,' but the 'Peer Gynt Suite' and the 'Poet and Peasant Overture,' why not jazz them?

"Argument would be wasted on him and people of his way of thinking. All we musicians can do or say to him and them is, 'Jazz hymns, ancient and modern and future, as much as you like--most of these are hardly above your own intellectual level--but keep your dirty paws off your betters.' "