Jazz Plus

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Marshall Stearns' The Story of Jazz (Oxford University Press, $5.75), quite apart from its primary value as a splendid survey and analysis of jazz from ancient West African origins to the latest weird collocations of sounds emerging from some basement on New York's 52nd Street, is a book that will provoke a good many double-takes among English teachers.

And that's as it should be. For Stearns, Harvard A.B. and Yale Ph.D., and currently associate professor of English literature at Hunter College, shows what intellectually stimulating things can happen when a rigorously trained humanist takes a role as penetrating and scholarly critic of a popular art. By academic training a specialist in medieval literature, with a biography of Robert Henryson (Columbia University Press) to his credit, Stearns has parlayed an avocational interest in jazz to his present preeminence as dean of jazz academicians-director of the Institute of Jazz Studies, indefatigable lecturer and organizer of symposia and jazz festivals, and State Department representative on Dizzy Gillespie's recent musical tour of the Middle East.

His book has seven sections: on pre-history in West Africa and the West Indies; origins in the vodun rituals and Negro marching bands of New Orleans; the nineteenth century American background, examining the various roles of the Great Awakening, the work song, blues, minstrelsy, spirituals, culminating in ragtime, a jazz style flourishing for the two decades to the end of World War I; the jazz age in the twenties; jazz yesterday and today, covering swing, bop, and Afro-Cuban music; three musicological chapters on the nature of jazz; and four final chapters on the future of jazz.

For an expert's analysis of what this book does and doesn't do in an absolute sense, readers should see Nat Hentoff's review in Commonweal (November 9, 1956). Hentoff, an editor of Downbeat, finds it "an important, original, and provocative study," but necessarily not the last word. Robert George Reisner's thirteen-page bibliography and list of jazz magazines and the splendid centerfolio of photos add to the book's value. Stearns brings an admirable catholicity to his appreciation of jazz, avoiding and deriding those various parochialisms that admire, at one extreme, only the most recent dissonance, or at the other, only the "purest" Dixieland.

RECORDS
Marshall Stearns' lively yet solid performance is reassuring: an academic approach does not necessarily smother the vitality of popular art in a sandhill of footnotes. No such prior doubt exists in the case of the protean Leonard Bernstein--composer, conductor, performer, entertainer. Last season on "Omnibus" Bernstein created a major sensation by his informally literate explication of his own love for jazz. The highlights of that program have been released as "What Is Jazz?" (Columbia LP 919), an analytic, as opposed to historical, study of this musical form.

A completely admirable aural essay, it proceeds in illuminating counterpoint from Bernstein's discussion to musical illustrations to further verbal explication. Blue notes, breaks, syncopation, instrumental colors, and other elements of jazz are explained through specific musical examples, e.g. pieces are played only on the white keys or without syncopation--and the musicological points are thereby made unmistakably clear. Bernstein is an unusually effective teacher. He explains the nature of the blues by creating "The Macbeth Blues": "I will not be afraid of death and bane--I said I will not be afraid of death and bane; Till Birnan Forest comes to Dunsinane."

A twelve-bar stanza, in which the first line of a rhymed couplet in iambic pentameter is repeated, Bernstein archly explains. Bernstein's record is a natural complement to Stearns' book. High school libraries should have them both. In fact, a single English teacher could bring a great deal of perspective to his high school's patronage of popular music by starting either a jazz club or a jazz library or both, each taking care of the other.

Further items for such a club library: The Story of Jazz, narrated by Langston Hughes (Folkways LP, FP 712, 117 West 46th Street, New York 36, with program notes); A Musical History of Jazz, narrated by Wally Cox, with notes by George Simon (Grand Awards Record LP, G.A. 33-322, Kingsland Avenue, Harrison, New Jersey); two jazz--records-of-the-month clubs: The Jazztone Society, 45 Columbus Avenue, New York 23; and Jazz Division, American Recording Society, 100 Sixth Avenue, New York 13; Rex Harris, Jazz (Penguin, A247, 850); Andre Hodeir, Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (Grove Press, 795 Broadway, New York 3, $3.50); Eddie Condon's Treasury of Jazz (Dial, $5); Jacques Barzun, Music in American Life (Doubleday, $2.75); Stephen Longstreet, The Real Jazz, Old and New (Louisiana State Press, $5); and Carter Harman's A Popular History of Music: From Gregorian Chant to Jazz (Dell, 500).

FILM
The lure of TV money prompted MGM and other major film producers to withdraw some of their abridged features from distribution. The same economic forces have, on the other hand, resulted in MGM's releasing many full-length features for educational distribution on 16 mm: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Bad Day at Black Rock, Billy the Kid, Captains Courageous, David Copperfield, Julius Caesar (Marlon Brando, James Mason, Deborah Kerr, Greer Garson), Mrs. Miniver, Pride and Prejudice, Red Badge of Courage, and Romeo and Juliet (Norma Shearer, Leslie Howard, John Barrymore). Black and white features rent from $15.00, on a sliding scale based on enrollment. The Romeo and Caesar have a $25 minimum rental. There are definite advantages to be had from studying the complete film even if they can't be squeezed into class periods as the abridged versions could. Assembly programs at the end of the school day might be a solution. Films Inc. (home office, 1150 Wilmette Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois) distributes these newly released features.

For an excellent analysis of the economic counterpressures between the film and TV industries, read Arthur Knight's "Films and TV--A Shotgun Marriage?" The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television, X (1956). In the same issue are good articles on TV playwrights in Hollywood, the future of film and TV in Britain, two articles on Olivier's Richard III and one on Maurice Evans' TV Taming of the Shrew-an extremely rewarding issue for the English teacher.

Pauline Kael's "Movies, The Desperate Art," The Berkley Book of Modern Writing, #3 (Berkley Publishing Corporation, 145 West 57th Street, New York 19, 500) is a jaundiced but frequently perceptive essay on the dilemma of the film critic in America. This paperback is a continuation of the Avon series on modern writing edited by William Phillips and Philip Rahv of the Partisan Review.

More moderate yet no less committed to the film as art is Richard Griffith's Samuel Goldwyn: The Producer and His Films (Museum of Modern Art Film Library, 11 West 53rd Street, New York 19). Griffith, curator of films at the museum, neatly destroys, in Goldwyn's case at least, the stereotype of the producer as a cigar-chewing moneybags disdainful of ART. This fifty-page pamphlet reviews a number of Goldwyn's films over the last generation and assesses his creative part in their production.

Ellen Conroy Kennedy has written a study guide for Friendly Persuasion, the film based on the Jessamyn West stories, in January Clearing House.

BROADCAST
Teachers who have wanted to use the free Hallmark film of Maurice Evans' Richard II (Association Films, 347 Madison Avenue, New York 17) but have hesitated because they lacked texts can now find an attractive, thoroughly reliable, substantially made paperback edition of the play in the new Pelican Shakespeare (Penguin Books, Alfred Harbage, general editor, 50 each). More will be said about this series in the future, the first volumes of which are Macbeth, Coriolanus, Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale, Hamlet, Richard II, Henry IV, Parts I and II, and Henry V.

Martin Mayer's "Television's Lords of Creation," Harper's (November 1956) is an excellent analysis of what a creative producer is up against in trying to bring a worthwhile program idea from conception through to production. Mayer discusses Weaver's regime at NBC and the reasons for his resignation. For people who have never seen TV programs in production, there is a remarkably clear description of how programs are staged. Mayer will study public affairs programing at CBS in a succeeding article. His article on NBC is all the more relevant to the English teacher since Weaver's departure from NBC has been taken by many as a signal that "cultural" programing will soon come upon less fortunate, if not evil, days.

A number of programs merit our attention this month: January 7, NBC-TV, Jose Ferrer in Pal Joey; January 13, NBC-TV, the American premiere of Prokofiev's opera War and Peace; and on the same date, over ABC-TV, Christopher Plummer appears in a long-awaited "Omnibus" production of Oedipus Rex. Next month, on February 4, NBC-TV, Anatole Litvak will produce Mayerling with Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer in the leads. And you might want to look ahead to the Old Vic's presentation of Romeo and Juliet with Claire Bloom, John Neville, and Paul Rogers on NBC-TV, March 4. A picture essay on the "Old Vic" appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine (October 14, 1956).