Rock 'n' Roll

Customarily, entertainment is thought to be something pleasurable, relaxing, sociable. People seek it -- especially in times of sturm und drang like our own -- for surcease from turmoil, for delight and amusement. When, therefore, a form of "entertainment" bursts on the world to the accompaniment of shrieks, groans, tears, moans, riot, mayhem and vandalism, the least curious citizen may pause to wonder just what the hell it's all about. We refer, of course, to rock 'n' roll which, during the past couple of years, has acquired a far-thundering, frantic reputation, along with a legion of dauntless devotees stretching from Bangkok to Bushyhead, Oklahoma, and back again. It has also picked up an equal number of furrow-browed, finger-wagging critics who howl in dismay at the very mention of it in polite company. It has taken the cosmos of Tin Pan Alley by absolute storm. During recent weeks, as many as six to eight of the top dozen tunes on every poll in the land were tidbits that had been popularized, and in most cases, composed, by rock 'n' roll artists: Presley's Too Much and All Shook Up; Fats Domino's Blueberry Hill and Blue Monday; Ivory Joe Hunter's Since I Met You, Baby, among others.

Rock 'n' roll has caused out-and-out bacchanals in Western Germany, bottle-busting in Newport, seat-slashing on Brooklyn subways and general pandemonium everywhere else.

"This latest phenomenon in the field of jazz," said one angry bluenose, "is ample evidence--if evidence were needed--that jazz music appeals to the basest primal instincts in man, rendering him little better than the beasts of the jungle." Well, everyone is entitled to his opinions about men and beasts -- but there are some cool cats among us who will object, and mightily, to rock 'n' roll being called jazz. On the other hand, if rock 'n' roll isn't a new school of jazz, what is it?

Jazz music is accepted as one of America's few original art forms; it is played in the nation's leading concert halls and taught at many universities; it has done much to make friends for America in foreign lands. In the three generations since its beginning, jazz has passed through a number of distinct forms, and variations of most of them are still being played today. In fact, exponents of most of the several recognized schools of jazz placed high in playboy's first All-Star Jazz Poll. New Orleans' Louis Armstrong won first place in the trumpet section with a style that goes straight back to the beginning of jazz, but second place trumpet went to cool schooler Chet Baker, and third place to Dizzy Gillespie, most closely identified with bop. Swing king Benny Goodman proved to be the most popular man with the clarinet, and readers picked Stan Kenton, of big band, progressive jazz fame, as the All-Star aggregation's leader. They also cast enough votes for a gentleman named Bo Diddley to put him in third place amongst guitarists, ahead of such recognized jazz greats as Tal Farlow, Freddie Greene and Johnny Smith. Bo Diddley, is a rock 'n' roller. So apparently rock 'n' roll has some standing with a sizable segment of the readers of Playboy.

Critics cry that rock 'n' roll is not legitimate jazz -- is hardly, in fact, even music! But some without the ear to hear made similar remarks about Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and their early experiments with bop, likening this important music to the sounds a waiter makes when dropping a tray of dishes. Perhaps, like bop, rock 'n' roll is simply a new phase of the changing jazz form to (continued on page 75)Rock 'n' Roll(continued from page 19) which many are not yet accustomed.

Critics decry the violence with which audiences react to rock 'n' roll, but the same sort of emotional response greeted Benny Goodman when he played the Paramount Theatre in the late Thirties at the height of the swing craze, and crowds went wild during the recent international tour of Louis Armstrong. Norman Granz, impresario of the Jazz at the Philharmonic sessions, was forced to include a "How to Behave" section in his printed programs, because of the overly enthusiastic reactions of some of his audiences. To this extent, rock 'n' roll seems no different from most of the several recognized schools of jazz.

Some grumble about the intellectual level of rock 'n' roll and point to the pre-kindergarten titles like Tweedle Dee Dee and Tra La La, but what about such jazz gobbledygook as Diz's Oop-Bop-Sh-Bam, Oo-Pa-Pa-Da and Ool-Ya-Koo? And who can forget Ella Fitzgerald's bopped up version of Flying Home? Was it jazz? You bet it was. The nonsense lyric has been a part of jazz from the very beginning.

What about the performers of r 'n' r? Do they have any recognized standing in the jazz field? Many were almost unknown before the rock 'n' roll craze, but the record shows that some men previously associated with top jazz groups have entered the field: Al Sears, a tenor man with Duke Ellington, is an r 'n' r favorite today; Sam "The Man" Taylor, bandleader for Alan Freed and his r 'n' r stage shows, once blew with Cab Calloway, Lucky Millinder and Cootie Williams; no less a musician than Lionel Hampton has been playing a brand of "jazz" of late that comes out strangely like rock 'n' roll (on an international tour, one Dutch newspaper gave this report of a riot at the strait-laced Amsterdam Concertgebouw: ". . . audience wildly prancing, flinging arms, screaming . . . saxophonist lying on back during solo, copulates with his shimmering instrument . . . two blackbooted city cops grab Hampton, take him offstage into dressing room. 'What did I do? Arrested for jazzing,' he moans. 'Call the ambassador.' "); and the Count Basie band, one of the greatest of all time, was a regular feature on Freed's CBS network radio show for a spell. Obviously, rock 'n' roll is somehow related to jazz and the ranks of r 'n' r do indeed boast some authentic jazzmen.

The relationship is the more undeniable when we consider the common origin of the names "jazz" (originally spelled jass) and "rock 'n' roll." Both are frankly sexual. Forty years ago, there was a ditty that went, "Jazz me, come on professor and jazz me . . ." and not too long after there was one that ran, "My daddy rocks me with a steady roll . . ." and both mean exactly what you think they mean.

So far, in presenting the case for rock 'n' roll as a jazz form in good standing, we've concentrated on what are -- after all -- peripheral questions. The heart of the matter is jazz music, and the question of whether rock 'n' roll can be considered to be part of its fabric. A brief backward glance at the history of the art will demonstrate the close relationship.

What was early jazz like? Well, basically it was a heady blend of ragtime -- usually fast, syncopated piano music -- and blues, which, fundamentally, is folk music linked strongly with such typical Americana as Frankie and Johnny. This music began around the turn of the century on plantations in the South and in honky-tonk cabarets up and down the East Coast and in most of the eastern United States. By the time of the first World War, ragtime and the blues had synthesized, and New Orleans pioneers like Armstrong and Kid Ory and King Oliver began to weave the first valid orchestral jazz into shape: soon white musicians followed suit with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings.

The 1920s saw the burgeoning of both vocal and instrumental blues, the expansion of instrumental jazz from purely improvised Dixieland into bigger band and orchestral patterns, and the consolidation of jazzdom's instrumental clan -- trumpets, trombones, clarinets, saxes, piano, guitar, bass, drums. During the 1930s, Tin Pan Alley, dance music and big-band jazz fused to give birth to the swing era: Goodman, Dorsey and Shaw paralleled the achievements of Ellington, Lunceford and Basie, and the swing style of jazz, a sophisticated blend of orchestration and improvisation, reached a big segment of the general public. The 1940s brought a still higher degree of searching musicianship among jazzmen, and with it, the experiments that led to a new and complex extension of jazz called bebop. This, in turn, blended into a more relaxed approach to jazz in which the heavy, hot-jazz accents of the Dixieland days ceded to a behind-the-beat, cool jazz approach.

And then came rock 'n' roll. Or did it? Wasn't it really there all along, masquerading under other names?

Back when phonograph records were yowling, lo-fi infants, beginning around 1923, there was a category of performance that was recorded specifically for a segregated market. It was known then as Race Music and some of its exponents were singers like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Mamie Smith, and instrumentalists like Fletcher Henderson and James P. Johnson. Most of these artists were later accepted, in fact hotly embraced, by the jazz cultists.

Toward the latter part of the 1930s, Race Music underwent a subtle change in character; by the time it switched its name in the early Forties and began to call itself rhythm-and-blues, it had assumed a variety of fascinating shapes.

As with other kinds of entertainment of Negro origin, rhythm-and-blues picked up white performers and audiences and its still newer tag, rock 'n' roll, began to take on many of the characteristics of the popular song hit (via Tin Pan Alley), both in material and approach. The phrase rock 'n' roll, then, has only acquired a generic connotation in recent years. By the time this stage had been reached, there were (and still are) basically three different brands of this type of music, each of which bears a different, but distinct, relationship to jazz.

First, there's the instrumental kind of r 'n' r, which varies from funky, hard-driving blues played on Hammond organs, electric guitars and other shock instruments all the way through to the honking, shirtless, blowing-tenor-while-lying-on-back type of saxophonist who has become, to some, the symbol of all rock 'n' roll. Despite Lionel Hampton's protestations, this is a nether form of jazz. Much of the music played is harmonically simple, based on such dyed-in-the-wool chord textures as I got Rhythm and the 12-bar blues, but performed with few of the subtle nuances through which modern jazzmen can sublimate them.

Very well, you may say; but if there's such a big difference, how come Basie's band was featured regularly on a rock 'n' roll show?

The answer, alas, shows all too clearly the source of the difference. After not too many weeks, Basie's band was dropped from the program on the grounds that it "didn't have the right kind of beat" and a band led by Sam "The Man" Taylor took over. What Basie lacked, what Sam Taylor had, was the pile-driving rhythm, the sledge-hammer accent on the second and fourth beat of the bar, that is administered to rock 'n' roll addicts as shock therapy. Basie also lacked the kind of tenor saxes that latch onto one note and honk it into the ground. His tenor men blew while sitting on chairs, and never removed their shirts during a chorus. Sam Taylor, despite his jazz background, has altered his style enough to accommodate r 'n' r demands.

Taylor defends the thwacking beat of rock 'n' roll and says he enjoys his work. "A lot of people have knocked it," he says, "because some of the artists are poor instrumentalists. It's not the music that's bad, it's the performers." This is an interesting, if somewhat left-handed, defense.

The second type of rock 'n' roll is exemplified by the solo vocalist. When he's a ballad singer, or a blues singer who elects to sing ballads, he's usually a pretty sad sounding sack. But when he sings the earthy, gutsy blues it's quite another story. Now he's going back home, to the cotton fields and the chain gangs of the Old South, to the very birth and roots of jazz.

Men like Joe Turner and Little Richard, women like Ruth Brown and Big Maybelle, in their truer, bluer moments, are indeed first cousins of the Lead bellys and Bessie Smiths of yesteryear.

One of the better artists in this category is Elvis Presley, whose posturings have been publicized so widely that the musical issues involved have been entirely lost in the hassle. On some of his records, there are distinct echoes of Joe Turner and Bill Crudup, whom he acknowledges as his major influences. His singing is a weird, but sometimes tasty, cocktail of country-and-western. rhythm-and-blues, jazz and folk music origins.

In Presley's case, and in those of most solo vocalists in this field, the material performed is as important as the performer. And the great majority of it comes from the alley called Tin Pan.

The third brand of rock 'n' roll is the music produced by vocal groups. What can you possibly say about the Blenders, the Comets, the Flairs, the Flamingos, the Cleftones, the Willows, the Valentines, the Colts, the Coasters, the Cardinals and the 444,444 vocal quartets that have sprung up since rock 'n' roll became a national fact?

You might start by recalling the case of the famous jazz drummer who decided to jump on the rocking, rolling band-wagon. To quote one of his sidemen, "We got a big band together, and a vocal group. But it wasn't an easy session; the vocal group was composed of good singers, so at first they couldn't get the authentic sound. It took quite a while to get them to sing out of tune."

But it's not only how they sing, it's also what they sing. There's the story about the jazzman who sat in a song publisher's office listening to the latest rock 'n' roll hit. "Isn't it amazing," asked the publisher, "to think that a song like that was written by a 13-year-old boy?" "Frankly, yes," replied the musician dryly, "I thought a song like that would have been written by a six-year-old boy."

So far, then, it looks as if a consideration of the three major manifestations of rock 'n' roll adds up to this: an indubitable connection with jazz, but one akin to that of the disreputable relative, or the skeleton in the jazz-family closet. And, as is so often the case with a frowned-upon fringe member of a group, the best in rock 'n' roll gets blamed for errors it didn't commit. Thus, a potential hit, just as it is helping to bring one of the better rock 'n' roll artists to prominence, is gobbled up by a performer or group that has easier access to mass communication media has readier acceptance on TV, radio and jukeboxes, and consequently takes the play away from the original, superior version. For example, Bill Haley's Comets outsold by far, with a pop version of Shake, Rattle and Roll, the excellent and jazz-valid job previously issued by Joe Turner; Pat Boone made a big hit out of Fats Domino's Ain't That a Shame and Lavern Baker has continuously lost out to Georgia Gibbs, a girl who brazenly copied not only the Baker vocal style but the entire arrangements on several big hits that both have recorded.

Now -- and now, only -- we're ready to arrive at some conclusions about rock 'n' roll and its place in the total jazz picture. While it is undeniably true that rock 'n' roll sinks its roots in the authentic rhythm-and-blues era of jazz history, it is, for the most part, a bastardized, commercialized, debased version of it. Its main appeal is to adolescent rebellion and insecurity. The original rhythm-and-blues expressed as best it could the honest, and often bitter, outpourings of a kicked-around people toward sex, work, money and similar basic facts of life. Rock 'n' roll, on the other hand, is ground out of Tin Pan Alley with an automatic crank -- low-grade rhythm songs based on elementary harmonic patterns; and ballads, most of which are shoddy, amateurish reproductions of some of the poorer tunes of the pop music field. It is successful because of its heart-on-sleeve sentimentality on the slower numbers, and the steam-roller incisiveness of the beat on the faster ones. It has thoroughly lost the wit and irony and sorrow and poetry and naked emotionalism that might have given it a valid reason for being. It is esthetically impoverished. As for the departure of certain jazz musicians into the current rock 'n' roll field, the reason is clear: they can make a good, steady living at it.

Though rock 'n' roll has produced some Bo Diddleys and Joe Turners and Ruth Browns, by and large, most of it bears the same relationship to jazz that wrestling does to boxing. The distress felt by fellow musicians and fans on finding jazz artists working in rock 'n' roll bands is exactly comparable with the reaction of fight fans to the sight of Joe Louis in the wrestling ring.

Man has evolved from lower forms of animal life and in this, he shares a common origin with the monkey. In the same way, authentic jazz and rock 'n' roll are related. But from its original ragtime beginnings -- through dixieland, swing, bop, progressive and cool -- jazz, like man, has learned to walk erect and speak with intelligence. Rock 'n' roll shares a common beginning with jazz, but it has evolved no further than the primitive, gibbering ape.