Introduction: Enactment in Sound

Kart, Larry

doi:10.12987/yale/9780300104202.003.0001

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Introduction: Enactment in Sound

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https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300104202.003.0001

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1–16

Published:

October 2004

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It seems clear that when Ernest Ansermet wrote “I couldn't say if these artists make it a duty to be sincere” in his famous 1919 article about Will Marion Cook's Southern Syncopated Orchestra and its “extraordinary clarinet virtuoso,” Sidney Bechet, he meant that sincerity of some special sort was among the virtues he found there. This was shrewd, even prescient, as was the comparison Ansermet drew between those musicians, especially Bechet, and the “men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” who cleared the way for Haydn and Mozart by making “expressive works [out] of dance airs.”

That the creation of “dance airs” was the literal role, socially and economically, of much jazz upthrough the end of the Swing Era almost goes without saying. And yet this was not the only role the music had to play, as Ansermet's emphasis on sincerity and expressiveness may suggest. Draw a line as early as the mid-1920s, and in the large body of remarkable music that already exists a strikingly individual personality is at work in almost every case—Bechet, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Johnny Dodds, Frank Teschemacher, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Earl Hines, et al. It could be argued that many of these musicians (certainly Armstrong and Smith) were inherently selfdramatizing, larger-than-life entertainers working in and for a marketplace that urged them to aggressively develop their skills along individual lines. But the weight of biographical and recorded evidence suggests that the dramatized selves these artists projected to the public were very much in tune with the selves they actually possessed, while other jazz artists who were not of a bold, demonstrative stripe (Beiderbecke, for one) also placed a definite personal stamp on their work and were, like their less reticent counterparts, valued for doing so.

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