https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2012/12/scairquotes-i.html =-=-=-=-= COMMENTS =-=-=-=-= Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media (1964) MIT Press edition (1994) "The word "jazz" comes from the French jaser, to chatter. Jazz is, indeed, a form of dialogue among instrumentalists and dancers alike. Thus it seemed to make an abrupt break with the homogeneous and repetitive rhythms of the smooth waltz. In the age of Napoleon and Lord Byron, when the waltz was a new form, it was greeted as a barbaric fulfillment of the Rousseauistic dream of the noble savage. Grotesque as this idea now appears, it is really a most valuable clue to the dawning mechanical age. The impersonal choral-dancing of the older, courtly pattern was abandoned when the waltzers held each other in a personal embrace. The waltz is precise, mechanical, and military, as its history manifests. For a waltz to yield its full meaning, there must be military dress. "There was a sound of revelry by night" was how Lord Byron referred to the waltzing before Waterloo. To the eighteenth century and to the age of Napoleon, the citizen armies seemed to be an individualistic release from the feudal framework of courtly hierarchies. Hence the association of waltz with noble savage, meaning no more than freedom from status and hierarchic difference. The waltzers were all uniform and equal, having free movement in any part of the hall. That this was the Romantic idea of the life of the noble savage now seems odd, but the Romantics knew as little about real savages as they did about assembly lines. "In our own century the arrival of jazz and ragtime was also heralded as the invasion of the bottom-wagging native. The indignant tended to appeal from jazz to the beauty of the mechanical and repetitive waltz that had once been greeted as pure native dancing. If jazz is considered as a break with mechanism in the direction of the discontinuous, the participant, the spontaneous and improvisational, it can also be seen as a return to a sort of oral poetry in which performance is both creation and composition. It is a truism among jazz performers that recorded jazz is "as stale as yesterday's newspaper." Jazz is alive, like conversation; and like conversation it depends upon a repertory of available themes. But performance is composition. Such performance insures maximal participation among players and dancers alike. Put in this way, it becomes obvious at once that jazz belongs in that family of mosaic structures that reappeared in the Western world with the wire services. It belongs with symbolism in poetry, and with the many allied forms in painting and in music." (pp. 279-280) =-=-=-=-=-=-= Ernest Borneman "The Roots of Jazz" in Jazz, ed. Henthoff and McCarthy] quoted in LeRoi Jones Blues People (1963) "While the whole European tradition strives for regularity—of pitch, of time, of timbre and of vibrato—the African tradition strives precisely for the negation of these elements. In language, the African tradition aims at circumlocution rather than at exact definition. The direct statement is considered crude and unimaginative; the veiling of all contents in ever-changing paraphrases is considered the criterion of intelligence and personality. In music, the same tendency towards obliquity and ellipsis is noticeable: no note is attacked straight; the voice or instrument always approaches it from above or below, plays around the implied pitch without ever remaining any length of time, and departs from it without ever having committed itself to a single meaning. The timbre is veiled and paraphrased by constantly changing vibrato, tremolo and overtone effects. The timing and accentuation, finally, are not stated, but implied or suggested. The denying or withholding of all signposts." (p. 31) More: Bodies and Artifacts (iii) =-=-=-=-=-=-= Christopher Lasch The Agony of the American Left (1969) "The one thing that emerges clearly from Herskovits's work is that whether one is talking about Latin America or about the United States, African survivals are easier to trace in areas like music and religion than in language, politics, social organization, and family life, where they seem almost nonexistent. "Unfortunately the whole question of African survivals has now become involved in the politics of cultural nationalism, and it is hard to argue against Herskovits without being accused of wishing to subvert the cultural identity of black people." (pp. 121-122) (more) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=