Cultural Amnesia (6 page)

In our own day, Philip Larkin had the least courtly, or anyway least courtly-love, of
mentalities: enslaving himself by handing his heart and soul to a female was the last thing on his mind. The submissiveness that began with the troubadors ended with him. When it came to love (or
“love again” as he called it in his last years), he saved himself in advance, by writing a poem. Writing the poem was not his way in, it was his ticket out. But the revelatory power
of love at first sight was one of his constant themes. “Latest face” meant what it said: just one more in a succession of beautiful faces was enough to make the whole tumult start
again. Throughout history, all the literary evidence suggests that men are fools for beauty and will attribute every virtue to comeliness until experience disabuses them of the illusion. Acumen
is no protection, because the initial effect is not assembled from particular judgements: it happens all at once, with the holistic suddenness of a baby reacting to its mother’s voice.
Female beauty has always been interpreted by men as the earthly incarnation of a divine benevolence. The occasional evil angel, from Salome to Kundry and from Lilith to Lulu, is a consciously
perverse thematic variation, and would have no artistic value if the expectation were not the opposite. For men, the first and shamefully unthinking flood of worship is the opposite of casual. It
is monumental, and Peter Altenberg got it in a phrase. What’s so only? He had self-knowledge. He could have added the lack of it to his long list of the two things that can ruin a
man’s life.

LOUIS ARMSTRONG

Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans in 1900 and died at home in New York in
1971, having done, in the intervening years, as much as anyone since Lincoln to change the history of the United States. The theory that art can have no direct impact on politics has the
advantage of staving off wishful thinking, but it takes a beating when you think of what Armstrong did, or helped to do. Jazz would not have been the same without him, and the whole artistic
history of the United States in the twentieth century, quite apart from the country’s political history leading up to the civil rights movement, would not have been the same without
jazz. There was no easy conquest, and Armstrong himself was the object of prejudice right to the end. He had to be brave every night he went to work. All the more edifying, then, that he
himself was colour-blind when it came to the music he had helped to invent.

Those pretty notes went right through me.

—LOUIS ARMSTRONG, TALKING
ABOUT BIX BEIDERBECKE

B
EFORE WE
LET
these words stir up bad memories, we should console ourselves with how they once started the long process of putting fallacies to rest. The first fallacy was that white men could not
play jazz. Bix Beiderbecke was white; Louis Armstrong was the strongest creative force in the early history of the music; so if Armstrong thought this highly of Beiderbecke, it follows that at
least one white man could play jazz. Everything was against Armstrong’s forming an objective judgement. Armstrong had good cause to believe that jazz had been invented by black musicians,
who had been systematically robbed of the rewards. Segregation dictated that it would have been inconceivable for Armstrong to hold Beiderbecke’s chair with the touring orchestra of Paul
Whiteman, whose very name might have been chosen by a satirist to illustrate what black musicians were up against. Armstrong and Beiderbecke would never have been allowed to play together in
public. The magnitude of the insult would have excused a bitter view. Yet Armstrong thought Beiderbecke was wonderful, and said so.

Nevertheless, and sometimes all the more, the fallacy lingered on until long after World War II. At
Sydney University in the late fifties I was introduced to New Orleans jazz by well-heeled college students who had been brought up listening to the shellac record collections of their
well-travelled fathers. These were still the early days of vinyl. The definitive Jelly Roll Morton LP had just come out and was used as a teaching aid by proselytes for New Orleans jazz, with the
Louis Armstrong Hot Five and Hot Seven collections waiting further up the line for advanced students. It was held to be axiomatic that you had to appreciate the drive and syncopation of
Morton’s Red Hot Peppers playing “Black Bottom Stomp” and “The Chant” before you could move on to the challenging, ensemble-shattering solo subtleties of Armstrong
playing “West End Blues.” It went without question that jazz was black music. One of the set books of our informal jazz faculty actually said so:
Shining Trumpets
by Rudi Blesh. In retrospect, Blesh’s book is a touching example of inverse racism: a white scholar, himself from a beleaguered minority, he was
claiming, on behalf of blacks, exclusive rights to an art form. The white clarinettist Mezz Mezzrow had done the same by immersing himself in a black culture: he did everything but black up. It
was Jim Crow in reverse. Mezzrow’s barely coherent book
Really the Blues
was on the course. Fated to supply the
dull passages in
some of the finest records Sidney Bechet ever made, Mezzrow was an average player and a worse than average writer, but his sacrificial passion was food for thought.

Unfortunately the thought was likely to be scrambled by self-indulgent, unearned empathy. The emotion was
admirable—disgust at racial inequality—but the speculative edifice that arose from it was painfully shaky on its base. Later on, Terry Southern questioned even the emotion, when he
wrote a short story about a white jazz fan trying to make up for his inadequacies by hanging out with the black musicians. But it didn’t need Southern to put the whole idea into doubt. The
idea was Jim Crow—white prejudice against blacks—stood on its head, and would have seemed so from the beginning if there had not been such a concerted effort on the part of white
liberal commentators to play a role in fighting Jim Crow when it was standing the right way up. The effort was commendable, but it depended on the suppression of evidence. Black creativity in
jazz was everything the inverted racists said it was, and more. But white creativity was real, and could be discounted only at the cost of obfuscation—a high price to pay for feeling
virtuous. By the end of my Sydney University years, the pre-war Benny Goodman small group recordings had been collected onto an LP and were among my regular listening. The crisp ensemble playing
and the lilting sequences of short solos were just as dazzling as anything from Morton or Armstrong. Goodman was white. End of argument. But the argument had been over for more than thirty years.
It was over when Armstrong went to hear Beiderbecke at the Savoy. If Armstrong hadn’t known something was up, he would never have gone.

Even without Armstrong’s generous testimony, it would be foolish to admit unquestioned the assumption of automatic
black supremacy in a given musical art-form. It cuts out too much white achievement. You can still hear, from black ideologues and their white sympathizers, that Fred Astaire couldn’t
really dance. He is held not to have possessed the proper, syncopated improvisational skills of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who could lead and drag the beat with different strata of
his body simultaneously. There might be something to it. Astaire rarely swayed a hip. Even in mid-miracle, the armature of his body was upright: underneath, he was strictly ballroom. But when you
consider what Astaire could do, the idea that he should be measured by what he
couldn’t is absurd. It should have been patently absurd, but there was a political aspect,
which applied beyond the kingdom of the dance to the world of American music in general. White men were in control, and they robbed the blacks. Armstrong never saw a dollar of royalties from all
his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings: there were more than sixty of them, they sold in the millions, but for too much of the rest of his life they didn’t save him from a single week of
one-night stands. His Hollywood earnings bought him the occasional vacation, but the royalties from his early masterpieces never materialized.

The white men not only took the money, they took the opportunites. Bojangles never got the chance to be
Fred Astaire. Billie Holiday bravely refused the demeaning coon-turn roles that Hollywood offered her. On top of the ravages of her abused childhood, her frustrations as an artist drove her to
drugs, and her whole tragedy—the tragedy of black talent in a white business—was part of the picture evoked by her signature tune “Strange Fruit.” The song is about lynch
law but so was her life. Bessie Smith, Charlie Parker, Charlie Christian—you could make a long list of victims just on the level of genius, let alone of mere talent. Even when you take due
note of the equally long list of those who never lost control of their lives—Ella Fitzgerald is a long list all by herself—the cruel scope of the injustice still shrieks to heaven.
The joy of the music is populated with unsleeping ghosts, and anyone who doesn’t see them isn’t using his eyes. But it’s a bad reason not to use our ears, which will hear, if we
let them, an awkward truth. Nothing can redress the flagrant inequalities of the past.

We can, however, refrain from compounding the insult. A man like Benny Goodman, for example, can’t possibly be
fitted into a schematic history that would base itself on the white exploitation of a black invention. He carried within himself the only answer to the conflict, and, as things have turned out,
he presaged the outcome: a measure of tolerance and mutual respect, and at least a step towards a colour-blind creative world. He was born as poor as any black; he was Chicago, meat-packing poor;
as poor as you could get. Being white, he was able to translate his prodigious talent into economic power: the very power to which black musicians, however successful, were always denied access.
But Goodman used his power to break the race barrier. Though his mixed small groups existed mainly in the recording studios and only
rarely on stage—the Carnegie Hall
appearance with Count Basie was strictly an interlude—the music they made was the emblem of a political future, and in the aesthetic present it was a revelation. It is still a revelation,
because in aesthetics the present is the only tense there is. There will always be a few diehards who deduce from those three-minute masterworks that Goodman’s clarinet was metronomic
compared to Charlie Christian’s guitar. But the diehards were born dead. They have had no living thing to say since Armstrong heard Beiderbecke’s pretty notes and saluted an
equal.

If the two avatars had the same stature, how could they sound so different? It raises another question.
Armstrong, with everything against him, knew how to lead an ordered life. Beiderbecke put as much energy into self-destruction as into creation. His father didn’t want him to play jazz.
Trying to prove to his father that his music would get him somewhere, the prodigal son sent home copies of all his records. His father never listened to them. You could call that a psychological
obstacle: but there were no other obstacles that began to compare with what Armstrong had to put up with every day. The main reason Beiderbecke could not stop drinking was that he was an
alcoholic. His short adult life was a long suicide. But the cautionary tale had an awkward corollary: his underlying melancholy got into his tone, and helped to make it unmistakable. Armstrong
could play blues with unmatched inventiveness, but his soul moved in jump-time: a sharp, staccato attack was basic to him. Crackling excitement was his natural mode. Beiderbecke, on the other
hand, was blue to the roots. Even his upbeat solos were saturated with prescient grief, and the slow numbers remind you of Ford Madox Ford’s catchline for
The Good Soldier
: this is the saddest story ever told.