Chicago
Review by Nikolas Mavreas
“Jazz is stupid. I mean, just play the right notes!” Though uninspired, this line from The Office TV series encapsulates a very common attitude. The quote is found in Andrew Berish’s new book Hating Jazz, alongside a formidable horde of examples of public negative reactions to the form. Hate transcends the music, of course, and a pillar of the book’s thesis is not just that hating jazz goes beyond the music but that it starts there.
At 192 pages including notes, any history spanning a century’s worth of material can only be cursory. This study resembles the character of an oral history, with voices ranging from the lowbrow of Parks and Recreation, The Simpsons and La La Land, through short stories and articles from The New Yorker, to the highbrow of Maxim Gorky and Theodor Adorno.
Hating jazz, Berish argues, is never just about the sound and is always communal. His analysis relies on the theory of affect, which understands emotion as “something that reaches across bodies, objects, and space.” The most common expression of jazz hatred, ridicule, “is always about social positioning, a statement about the kinds of people we do and do not value.”
It seems to follow, then, that criticism of the music is always linked to race, which the book argues throughout. “Attacking jazz,” Berish writes, “or some versions of jazz, as bad music, is inevitably implicated in an understanding of Blackness in American life.” Berish is wonderfully nuanced on this topic, his treatment simmering with the heat of past discussions, like that produced by Stanley Crouch’s – a black writer’s – vicious critique of late Miles Davis.
With the popularity of the music among the white middle classes in the United States and elsewhere, came its adoption by white musicians. At the same time, the improving education and increasing political consciousness among black musicians was leading to music of greater and greater sophistication. The complex internal struggles around these processes are perhaps exemplified today in the figure of Wynton Marsalis, the most institutionally established jazzman in history, who is hated by a large portion of the progressive jazz world.
The growing sophistication of jazz, its complication since the coming of bebop, with its eschewing of simple rhythms and melodies, is surely a focal point of casual aversion to the genre. That is, after all, what the “just play the right notes” joke from The Office is about. But Berish underplays the significance of the sounds themselves an enormous amount. And, while he is necessarily discerning between types of jazz when talking about criticism coming from insiders like Crouch and Marsalis, he treats the field as a monolith when he views it from the perspective of the derisive outsider. I believe it’s fair to say that many listeners who would declare their love for Louis Armstrong, could, shortly after, declare their hatred for Thelonious Monk. An important point of elementary subtlety which is mostly ignored here.
“I used to think that anyone hearing a Parker record would guess he was a drug addict, but no one hearing Beiderbecke would think he was an alcoholic, and that this summed up the distinction between the kinds of music.” That is Philip Larkin, the librarian, jazz critic and occasional poet, making a clever illustration of a musical point, which is tarnished in our eyes by his choosing to elevate a white musician over a black one. The English Larkin’s reluctant condemnations of post-war jazz are not sampled from in this volume, as is not, in fact, almost anything from outside the United States.
Jazz has become property of the world, the closest thing we have to a global folk music, and a very close one, at that. From Tokyo to Sao Paulo, strangers can improvise on “Autumn Leaves” together as easily as Irish folk musicians can join in on a performance of “Drowsy Maggie.” Equally global is the “just play the right notes” kind of aversion, as well as most other kinds. An American focus is natural and understandable, but a wider scope would help control for irrelevant parameters.
On the book’s stylish cover, the word “jazz”, stately in towering black letters, has “hating” sprayed over it in vandalizing white. It unfairly simplifies a carefully considered work. Separate from its main thesis, the brief, understated skewering of “jazz bros” and jazz misogyny is particularly enjoyable.
