"Jazz," the Critics, and American Art Music in the 1920s

Abstract

Music critics and social commentators in 1920s expressed differing views on relationship of jazz to American art music. The debate about jazz-about its origins and defining characteristics, its intrinsic worth, and its role in establishing a uniquely American musical style was of paramount interest to those concerned with present and future of American and was waged with particular vigor in periodicals that regularly featured discussions of music: among journals, Music Quarterly, Modem Music, and omnibus Musical America; among more broadly focused political and literary periodicals, liberal Nation and New Republic, H. L. Mencken's American Mercury, and literary little magazine Dial. The above-named sources reveal that term jazz once conveyed broader meaning than it does today. In a general sense it sometimes referred to contemporary attitudes and modes of expression. The critic Waldo Frank, for example, in a 1928 article for New Republic, grouped T S. Eliot, Irving Berlin, H. L. Mencken, and Sinclair Lewis together in a family of jazz,' because the trick in jazz dance or song, jazz comic strip, jazz vaudeville stunt, of twisting a passive reflex to our world into a lyrical self-expression was in all their arts.' British art critic Clive Bell used term to signify any form of art or expression that demonstrated a preference for short, obvious, and uncomplicated.2 And musical definitions could be as vague as music enjoyed by and large among people of any country.3 Conceptions of what constituted jazz ranged widely in twenties, and few writers, in fact, sought to define jazz in musical terms.4 Instead,