Fitting the Slipper

Now that jazz is certified as America's own cultural contribution, the music world has pretty well taken it into the family. But only as a sort of stepsister. Classical musicians and listeners accept its presence, but they don't necessarily understand it, much less like it. Even the compliments they pay it--such as Stravinsky's frequently ex pressed fondness for its syncopated rhythms-- tend to miss the point and be come condescending.

Clearly, what jazz and classical music need are mediators who can boast impeccable credentials in both camps. Gunther Schuller is such a man. A composer, conductor, and president of Boston's New England Conservatory of Music, he is also a seasoned jazz composer, critic, lecturer and performer (French horn). Now he has put his combined backgrounds to work brilliantly in a new book, Early Jazz (Oxford; $9.75). The first of a projected two-volume musical history, the book is nothing less than the definitive guide to jazz for the classical-music fan.

Historical Squabbles & Byways. Schuller avoids the excesses that have blighted so much previous writing on jazz -- the legendmongering, the amateur guesswork, the "in-group jargon and glossy enthusiasm." He does plunge into some historical squabbles, notably in his attacks on the stock notion that only jazz rhythms came from Africa while its melodies and harmonies were derived from Europe; actually, he says, all of its musical elements came largely from Africa. Here and there he explores an intriguing historical byway, as in his study of the influence that New Orleans opera performances had on the ragtime and blues of Creole Composer Jelly Roll Morton. And he even unearths an occasional gee-whiz oddity, such as the fact that one of the first authentic white Dixieland bands was led by Jimmy Durante.

But most of the time he plies a sober, analytical course through the jazz recordings made between New Orleans' Storyville days and the birth of the big-band era in the early 1930s. He scrutinizes Louis Armstrong's solo on Big Butter and Egg Man (1926) as if it were a song of Mozart's. In fact, he writes, "not even a Mozart or a Schubert composed anything more natural and simply inspired." Blues Singer Bessie Smith's laments of a gin-soaked life might as well be lieder sung by Lotte Lehmann for the way Schuller praises their "fusion of technical perfection with a profound depth of expression."

In all, Schuller makes a most persuasive case for the argument that the beauties of jazz "are those of any great, compelling musical experience: expressive fervor, intense artistic commitment and an intuitive sense for structural logic." Who knows? If the slipper fits, music's Cinderella may one day even go to live in the castle of esthetic status, cultural respectability and all that ]azz.

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