"Moldy Figs" and Modernists: Jazz at War (1942–1946)

BERNARD GENDRON

The historical transformation of jazz from an entertainment music to an art music, initiated by the bebop revolution in the mid-1940s, represents arguably one of the most significant cultural shifts of this century.

Mass culture and modernist high culture, it is now agreed, have been in constant communication since both their inceptions sometime in the mid-nineteenth century. But, for a long while, this interchange was decidedly one-sided, as modernists eagerly appropriated materials and devices from a more passive mass culture for the purposes of formal experimentation, parody, and shock—such as Dada's exploitation of the cabaret form and Stravinsky's use of ragtime and the tango.

With the bebop revolution, and since, mass culture has been more the aggressor in this interchange. Rock music, films, MTV, and advertisements have liberally scavenged from a whole storehouse of avant-garde devices and practices, though no form of mass culture seems to have crossed the boundary between "entertainment" and "art" as decisively or irreversibly as jazz.

This is the first of three essays that will deal with the bebop revolution as a major nodal point in the history of interchanges between mass culture and modernist art. In this essay I reconstruct the discursive changes in the jazz community that immediately antedated the bebop revolution and made possible its reception as an avant-garde music.

Warring Factions

The jazz world in the 1940s was embroiled in two major factional wars, two schisms in which spokespersons for the new were set off against those for the old. During a period spanning less than a decade the centuries-old battle between ancients and moderns so endemic to Western culture was twice reenacted. Swing music, the music of the big bands which had dominated jazz and the popular sales charts since 1935, was deeply implicated in both disputes, in one case supported by modernists and in the other by traditionalists. The first of these conflicts pitted swing against the newly revitalized New Orleans jazz, which it had supplanted, and the second against the bebop avant-garde movement that threatened to make it obsolescent.

The seeds for the first jazz war were sown in the late 1930s when a few nightclubs, defying the big band boom, began to feature small jazz combos playing in the abandoned New Orleans style of the 1920s, today popularly referred to as "Dixieland." Such a mild turn of events would not have led to a Dixieland revival without the enthusiastic participation of the aficionados and cultists of the old jazz, who collected out-of-print records and exchanged arcane discographical information.

These purists were driven not only by nostalgia but by a revulsion toward the swing music industry, which by shamelessly pandering to the mass markets had in their eyes forsaken the principles of "true" jazz. A spate of small sectarian journals appeared on the scene to give vent to these revivalist views and concerns. They set themselves off as the only authentic alternatives to the two dominant mainstream jazz journals, Down Beat and Metronome, which were altogether beholden to the swing phenomenon.

In 1942 Metronome fired the first shot of the modernist-revivalist war with a vigorous attack on the exclusionary purism and incessant carping of the revivalists, whom it derisively labeled "moldy figs" (Ulanov 1942). Over the next four years, in a continuous barrage of editorials and articles, Metronome would castigate New Orleans jazz as technically backward and "corny," and the writers of the revivalist journals as hysterical cultists and musical ignoramuses, against whom it positioned itself as the defender of modernism and progress in jazz. The revivalists counterattacked with charges of crass commercialism, faddism, and Eurocentrism.

By 1946, just as this war was scaling down, a second battle of jazz ancients and moderns was beginning to heat up. Modernism was now being represented by the bebop school—most notably Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Bud Powell—while swing music suddenly found itself relegated to the company of New Orleans jazz, on the side of the traditional and the tried-and-true. Bebop's opponents complained about the inaccessibility and undanceability of the music, the "wrong notes" and excessive musical acrobatics, the elitism, hostility, and avant-garde posturing of the musicians, their unconventional dress and morally suspicious life-styles.

As a jazz movement, bebop triumphed in 1948 and died in 1950, only to be reclaimed later in the canon of jazz history. It was abandoned even by its modernist supporters, who laid in wait for the next phalanx in the triumphal march of modern, experimental jazz.

Aesthetic Discourses and Musical Revolutions

The bebop revolution has since been enshrined in the jazz canon as a contest of epic proportions, occurring at the major fault line of jazz history. Bebop is given credit for having transformed jazz from a popular dance music, firmly ensconced in the Hit Parade, to a demanding, experimental art music, consigned to small clubs and sophisticated audiences. In contrast, the Dixieland war is usually construed as a retrograde sideshow, a rearguard skirmish that temporarily delayed the avant-garde advances initiated by bebop.

I will be contesting this too tidy a view of what admittedly has turned out to be the most significant permutation within jazz history. What will especially have to be rejected is the severe contrast drawn between a backward-looking Dixieland war and a forward-looking bebop war. In point of fact, both contests were fought on much of the same discursive terrain—the same field of concepts, issues, aesthetic standards, and opposing theories. Indeed, the Dixieland war, as it waned, transposed itself so subtly into the bebop war that many contemporaries failed to distinguish between them.

This suggests that the apparently retrograde Dixieland war played a significant role in the transformation of jazz from an entertainment music to an avant-garde music. I am not asserting, however, that the New Orleans revival was, or was ever meant to be, an avant-garde musical movement, nor am I denying that bebop made the key musical innovations that ushered in the era of modern jazz. What I am...