From Hot to Cool to the Conservatory

The Jazz Scene, Eric Hobsbawm, 1959.

Today it would be hard to declare, as Eric Hobsbawm did in 1959, that “jazz is a musical manifesto of populism”. Jazz is now a minority interest - largely confined to the musician, middle-class arts student, specialist festival, or well-aged enthusiast. But for at least the first half-century of its existence, this was far from the case. Born in the urban slums of the fin de siècle United States, matured in the speakeasies, whiskey bars and dance-halls of the world, jazz was the first musical phenomenon to achieve international popularity. Unlike other folk traditions, it rapidly became a global idiom, perhaps the first. Unlike classical music, it began as inherently anti-elitist, irredeemably proletarian. But somehow, the musical idiom of poor, black, urban and young Americans wound up the sister of European classical music; found primarily in the conservatory, student bar or bourgeoise record collection - all in the space of less than fifty years. On the other hand, the successors to the black musical tradition, hip-hop and rap, have been massively popular for almost fifty years now, showing no signs of either losing popularity nor becoming ‘serious’ music. To a lesser extent, the same could be said of rock-and-roll. So what happened to jazz?

Now, this is not the question Hobsbawm, the famed English social historian who moonlit as a jazz critic, answers in The Jazz Scene. Rather, his goal is a history of jazz - the music, the musicians, the economics, and the audiences. But l think The Jazz Scene achieves more than this. In 1959, Hobsbawm could still write that the average jazz fan was young, rock-and-roll was a passing ‘craze’, and that jazz was largely looked down upon in polite society. But within less than a decade of The Jazz Scene’s publication, none of this would still be the case. Jazz would have irrevocably entered a new era, abandoned by the young and embraced by the conservatory. Luckily for us, Hobsbawm could glimpse what was ahead and diagnose causes in situ; even if, perhaps, he was too close to grasp the full significance of what was unfolding. Above all else, this is why I believe The Jazz Scene illuminates how the frenetic sounds of black New Orleans wound up as American classical music.

A product of mixed French, Spanish, and Anglo-American folk cultures from the black American South, jazz - as with most modern traditions - was born at the end of the nineteenth century. As black Americans migrated northwards en masse after 1916, it would come to spread across the United States. Although centred around New Orleans, which produced, among others, Jelly-Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong; this early jazz was highly varied. Every city had its own musicians, styles, and influences. It was not long until, by the mid-twenties, jazz became the “musical idiom of black popular music all over America”, as Hobsbawm put it. Outside of the black community, however, one should not overstate the growth in the jazz public during this period. It was met with predictable disdain by white America; described by a New Orleans newspaper in 1918 as a “low streak in man’s tastes that has not yet come out in civilisation’s wash”. Racial and geographical barriers held firm. Until the end of the 1920’s, the forays jazz made into white American and European culture were mainly in bastardised forms; either jazz-influenced dance and pop music, or exclusively through white jazz groups, mostly Chicago style. Authentic jazz was restricted to the black, often immigrant communities it had grown up in. The Great Depression of 1929 would only compound this situation - as big bands collapsed and record sales plummeted, authentic jazz was crippled. It would not recover until 1935.

However, while the reach of jazz had not much expanded from 1900-1929, it had evolved significantly; most notably, ‘hot’ jazz had come to maturity. Marked by large bands of fourteen to fifteen players, big brass sections, and conformity to the demands of 78 RPM records, ‘hot’ jazz was epitomised and perfected in the orchestras of virtuoso arrangers Duke Ellington and Count Basie. So many conventions of modern pop come from hot and swing jazz; the blues ‘riff’ pioneered by the Basie band, strong rhythmic movement, informal rather than formal dancing, the touring concert band, and the crowding of an audience around the bandstand during gigs.

These musical innovations would bear fruit - they were the basis upon which ‘swing’ jazz (a derivative of the hot) conquered pop music in the mid-thirties. Jazz would exit the slump of the depression years, and on the back of the great big bands, it would enter what Hobsbawm felt to be a “golden age”. Further contributing to success were the ‘revivalist’ movements, the New Orleans and Dixieland revivals being the most important. According to Hobsbawm, these ultimately made jazz into an “international mass movement… and eventually commercialised it”. Crucially, revivalism was the first authentic jazz movement orientated towards “white youths and intellectuals”, rather than to the black American public. Attracting a predominantly European audience, including Hobsbawm himself, it bought authentic jazz outside the United States for the first time. In short time, jazz would spread truly globally: Japan, the Caribbean, West Africa, and Australia would all fall under the influence. In Hobsbawm’s words, “by the middle 1950’s… Jazz had become a world idiom”.

As an aside, a revivalist movement harkening back to New Orleans blues would flourish within this ecosystem, especially in Britain. It would produce a rock-and-roll progenitor known as ‘skiffle’, characterised by simplified blues rhythms and amateur guitarists. In a 1993 foreword to The Jazz Scene, Hobsbawm speculates that the success of the ‘British Invasion’ could be attributed to how rock-and-roll grew out of the dynamic revivalist-cum-skiffle tradition in the United Kingdom, as opposed to the much less sophisticated, wholly rhythm-and-blues origins of American rock. Counterintuitively, jazz may have been what won America for the Beatles.

But this “golden age” of hot jazz, so beloved by Hobsbawm, would ultimately come to an end. Beginning in the late thirties, newfound success would produce an avant-garde seeking two ends simultaneously; distance from swing and revivalism (which they saw as over-commercialised); and intellectual respect for jazz as art. The first was a result of the natural, well-documented tendency of artistic movements to reject commercial success as compromising; a response to the unarguable encroachment of pop music on jazz during the late thirties. The second, according to Hobsbawm, was an instinct ultimately acquired from the racially-motivated earlier insistence by white orthodox culture that jazz, despite its unambiguous technical achievements, was not serious music. This avant-garde were the ‘boppers’, and the music they produced was modern, ‘bebop’ or ‘cool’ (as opposed to ‘hot’) jazz. The pioneers were Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Lester Young; the culmination groups such as the Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, and Modern Jazz Quartet’s. Formed in smaller groups with less emphasis on brass and rhythm, their music was clearly classically influenced - sometimes more similar to a Bach fugue than a Louis Armstrong record. Unlike swing, revivalism, or skiffle, cool jazz was a musician’s movement. Hobsbawm saw that “more than their predecessors, the cool players and arrangers also dreamed of an educated composed jazz capable of competing with the classics”. Although it proceeded without much fanfare during the forties, modern jazz would, by the late fifties, eventually win a small audience, largely comprised of young intellectuals and other musicians. As far as Hobsbawm was concerned, however, “so long as jazz is jazz it will always be anchored to some sort of stylistic pattern by the need to be a music for dancing”. For this reason, Hobsbawm believed cool jazz destined to comfortable stagnation. Perhaps a love of hot jazz clouded his analysis, or perhaps the post-1959 victory of the cool was genuinely unexpected. Either way, nowhere in The Jazz Scene does Hobsbawm envision what would soon transpire; that cool jazz would become the predominant jazz music.

Of course, cool jazz was influential enough by 1959 that Hobsbawm had to acknowledge the possibility it could succeed. After all, he had observed that “for the past dozen years or so a great deal of jazz has not been played for dancing, but for listening, often in concert halls and recital rooms”. But rather than welcoming the triumph of “pure, spare, and sober technique”, the development of the cool worried Hobsbawm greatly. He feared that the “yearning for recognition” on the part of the modernists would ultimately cost jazz what had separated it from orthodox high culture - folk roots and a young audience. With hindsight, we can see his concerns were prescient. Cool jazz did trade folk populism for classically-influenced elitism; Bach took precedence over the blues, and the educated middle-classes became the source of both players, and listeners. Jazz would comfortably enter the conservatory, while simultaneously abandoning the field of pop music entirely. It would soon fade - and rapidly so - from youth culture; displaced by rock-and-roll, then hip-hop, and for good.

Some figures are hard to fit into this story; in particular, Art Tatum, Charles Mingus, and Thelonious Monk come to mind. All three straddled hot and cool, crossing the crudely-outlined movements I presented here. But I think the narrative I extracted from Hobsbawm, heavily stylised though it may be, still stands. In forewords published decades later, Hobsbawm mourns what jazz used to be; lamenting how “the young, without whom jazz cannot exist… abandoned it, and with spectacular suddenness”. Modern jazz, which had “elegance and polish, but almost no blues feeling” never quite did it for Hobsbawm - his writings for the New Statesman show a marked ambivalence towards Davis and Brubeck, and a profound admiration for the bandleaders of the thirties. I must admit to enjoying the elegance and polish; as much as I love Count Basie and the Duke, it is ultimately the cool era - Davis, Brubeck, Oscar Peterson - that I always return to. But my preferences are undoubtedly the product of the intellectualisation, fossilisation, and deification which transformed the genre since the late fifties. For Hobsbawm, “jazz cannot survive like baroque music, as a form of pastiche or archeology for the cultured public”. It would be hard to argue that is not how jazz has survived since 1959. In that light, perhaps Hobsbawm’s jazz died decades ago; snuffed out the moment most young people ceased dancing along.