Scholar on Swing

For a long time jazz, the blowsiest of the arts, has needed to have its hair combed and its socks pulled up. Not until last week, when a scholar from the other side of the musical tracks took time out to tidy up the whole subject, had anyone done much sound thinking or writing about one of America's two native art forms (the other: the animated cartoon).

A violinist in three symphonies, for ten years head of the department of theory and composition of the New York Philharmonic Scholarship School and for the past year the editor in charge of TIME'S music department (but not of this review), Winthrop Sargeant is not concerned in his Jazz: Hot and Hybrid* with the question of whether Benny Goodman is a better hot clarinetist than Joe Marsala or who played the piano on Fletcher Henderson's record of Wang Wang Blues. Instead, he rolls up his sleeves and squares off with a lucid chapter on "Improvisation, Notation and the Aesthetics of Folk Music." "Folk music," says Author Sargeant, "is the anonymous and musically illiterate expression of a whole people." America's folk music is jazz and the folk who originated it were Negroes. The contention is an old one, but hitherto nobody had taken such trouble to authenticate it.

Jazz interests Scholar Sargeant but does not fascinate him. He finds it "an art without positive moral values, an art that evades those attitudes of restraint and intellectual poise upon which complex civilizations are built. At best it offers civilized man only a temporary escape into drunken self-hypnotism." Like the American skyscraper, movie plot and funny paper, Jazz has no conclusion. But, admits Author Sargeant, it has vitality and, maybe, a future.

* Arrow Editions ($5).

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