Barry Ulanov, "The Judging of Jazz"

The Judging of Jazz

Barry Ulanov

Chapter 11 of Barry Ulanov, The Handbook of Jazz, Viking Press, 1957, 137-142.

“To make sense out of one’s emotions as they are aroused by jazz, one must be willing to develop a kind of introspection in which those emotions are constantly subject to rigorous analysis, analysis more intellec-tual than most people like to give their emo-tions. The end product of such self-exami-nation is usually recognition that the border-line between emotions and intellect barely exists, at least as far as the knowing res-ponse to an art is concerned, even to an art that, like jazz, seems so much of the time to be largely directed at the emotions.”

—Barry Ulanov

For Plato the judging of music was simple: some harmonies were effeminate and convivial, some plaintive, some violent, some tranquil. One was a success or a failure as a composer or performer to the extent that one chose correctly from a small number of modes for a small number of purposes. For us it is a great deal more difficult: there is no such simple identification of sound and purpose for our composing or performing or listening.

If our listening is instructed by any set of conventions, it is equally taught by temperament and taste. We rarely react to music the same way twice, even when we have a composer’s declared intention before us and a technical knowledge of what he has accomplished in his music. Now if that is true of performances limited by fixed notes on paper and firm traditions in the execution of those notes, how much more will it be true of jazz, in which each performance is designed to be different from every other!

How, then, in a sea of shifting values, in which change seems to be all that is constant, do we ever make judgments? Our most important answer comes, I think, when we recognize that not everything does change in jazz. There are certain elements in jazz sufficiently alike to be called constant, from performance to performance, from school to school, from instrument to instrument. The identification of these elements makes an excellent starting place for any valid value judgment in jazz.

Certain of these elements are central to all music. We should be concerned, for example, with identifying the technical background of a performer, in jazz as elsewhere; we must know, through our own ears or those of others, something of a performer’s grasp of harmonic and melodic and rhythmic essentials. Even with the peculiar approach of jazzmen to pitch and color, we should be able to describe with some accuracy the intonation and attack of this or that performer on this or that instrument, or of whole sections or whole bands. It is possible to detect the steadiness or unsteadiness of beat of a jazzman, whether in a rhythm section or not. And finally, even within the enormous restrictions of words, some of the characteristic resonances and timbres of individual players can be sketched in outline, or drawn with some degree of identifying detail.

We have in jazz today, too, something that might be called a first cousin to tradition: the variety of styles that have developed around the playing and singing of the blues, around certain New Orleans classics for those who play in the Dixieland tradition, or around songs such as “I Got Rhythm,” “Back Home in Indiana,” “How High the Moon,” “Lullaby of Birdland,” “Moonlight in Vermont,” “Foggy Day,” “Don’t Blame Me,” “Embraceable You,” and “All the Things You Are”—tunes we associate with dozens of different approaches to jazz, from swing to the most advanced jazz counterpoint. In the bop era, with certain sets of figures, such as “Hothouse” and “Donna Lee,” “Groovin’ High,” and “Ko- Ko,” went certain ways of playing, built around the solos of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. In later years other tunes have become permanently attached to other personalities. None perhaps is as irresistibly associated with a performer in the jazz listener’s mind as “Body and Soul” with Coleman Hawkins in the swing era or almost any part of his whole repertory with Charlie Parker today, but all are unmistakably tied to one jazzman or another. All background material can be scrutinized in describing new performances of old tunes; at least as much of it as is clearly relevant can be examined. This may be a nuisance in the normal execution of reviewing duties or in the quick consideration of an addition to one’s record library; but in the more extended evaluation of a significant performer or performance, such comparative history is extremely valuable.

Once one has approached the forms of jazz with this many facts in mind, it is possible to indulge fancy. Then one can begin to attack the elusive problems of content in jazz. One can examine the kinds of emotion, no matter how thoroughly personal, that may be elicited by a given piece of music. With all the necessary limitations in mind, one can classify the degrees of excitement or the grades of assuagement; the brightness or fullness of a particular kind of chord; the moods evoked by long melodic lines thoroughly consonant in texture or by more dissonant short ones. One may discover that a certain solidity in scoring or a particular looseness will correspond to some sequence of emotions. One may find that incisive statements of melody are bracing or that diffuse ones cause the attention to wander and utterly disengage the emotions.

This is an intensely subjective set of responses to jazz that I have been describing, but it is a very important one. It involves highly individual thresholds of pleasure and pain, very personal definitions of musical right and wrong, and assertions of taste and distaste of which there may be as many as there are listeners to jazz. To make sense out of one’s emotions as they are aroused by jazz, one must be willing to develop a kind of introspection in which those emotions are constantly subject to rigorous analysis, analysis more intellectual than most people like to give their emotions. The end product of such self-examination is usually recognition that the borderline between emotions and intellect barely exists, at least as far as the knowing response to an art is concerned, even to an art that, like jazz, seems so much of the time to be largely directed at the emotions.

Sooner or later one does recognize, in any serious attempt to organize one’s reactions to jazz, that this is a highly intellectual procedure which requires unfailing self-discipline not unlike that to which the jazz musician regularly subjects himself. The inspiration for such discipline must ultimately be the quality of the music itself and the conviction that there really are high technical standards in jazz, supported by sensitive performers who have a clear goal to which their performances can and should be directed.

What is the goal of the jazz musician? If it can be named, obviously much of what we have been talking about can be examined in the light of a jazzman’s success or failure in reaching that goal and in terms of a jazz listener’s ability to follow him along the way. It is audacious to attempt to define any simple, uniform goal as the end purpose of all jazz musicians. Nevertheless it is an attempt I must make, for it seems clear to me that whatever other intentions may outwardly occupy the jazzman’s playing and inwardly command his thinking and feeling about his music, one central concern animates him beyond all others. This can be summed up in a word that is familiar enough: development. Jazz, in common with a great many other arts in our time, has ceaselessly exercised itself over the need to go forward. To make progress is the great aim of most jazz musicians today. No dimension of time holds such allure for them as the future; no condemnation seems so terrible to them as that of being “dated.”

At its worst this preoccupation with forward movement settles into a debilitating courtship of the merely novel in jazz. At its best it accounts for a profound probing of materials which can make a close encounter with the jazzman’s mind a remarkably stimulating experience. No matter how ruthlessly the well-equipped self-analyst in jazz disposes of the recent past as archaic or outmoded; no matter how warped his historical sense, he does have firm hold on the central fact about jazz: it is an improvised music. It is here that judgment becomes arduous, if not altogether frustrating. Here we must ask questions about the construction of a jazz performance that are almost unanswerable, sending us back again and again to the performance itself. No matter how willing the performer may be to talk about what he has done, he will not easily find the words to describe his achievement if it really is an achievement; the music will have to speak for itself.

It is best, then, at this point to recognize the limitations of the jazz musician, the jazz critic, the jazz audience. We can make statements about certain fixed technical elements in jazz. We can establish some comparative history in the performance of a tune or construction of a style or development of a playing personality. We can make some effort to sort out our own emotional responses to the music. Then we must come to this element of the jazz musician’s self-examination, his self-development, his relentless concern with the materials of jazz and his conquest of them.

Jazz may not always be so deeply engrossed in the examination of itself. But as it stands now, any judgment of this music must ultimately face this fact—and not only face it but be pleased with it. Anyone who wants to spend much time with jazz must recognize that almost all of a jazz musician’s energies and talents are directed toward the systematic exploration of his music and hence of himself. No figure so well sums up the position of the modern jazzman as the seated Buddha thoughtfully observing his navel. If this sort of preoccupation, thoroughly self-centered in the fascination the performer finds in his own personality and at the same time selfless in the jazzman’s analytical concern for the whole art of music—if this sort of concentration in any way offends one, then one ought to begin one’s judgment of jazz by judging oneself uninterested.

			The Jazz Annex A Resource for Guests of Tony Flood's House of Hard Bop
	Barry Ulanov estab-lished a reputation as a scholar, writer and translator in several fields, including litera-ture, visual arts, religion and psychology. He taught at Princeton Uni-versity (1951-53) and Barnard College (1953-88) and was active in the Church following his conversion to Catholic-ism in 1951. He wrote many books on religion and psychology, often in collaboration with his second wife, Ann Belford Ulanov, a professor at Union Theological Semi-nary in Manhattan, where he also taught a course until 1999. To jazz fans, however, he was best known as the author of some of the earliest serious stu-dies of the music, and was a high-profile champion of the moder-nists in the internecine battles of the bebop era. He began to write about jazz while in col-lege, and became the editor of Metronome in 1939. Ulanov radically reshaped the editorial policy, introducing cove-rage of black jazz musi-cians, and supporting the radical new develop-ments of bebop as the decade progressed. The emergence of bebop precipitated one of the schismatic splits which sprinkle jazz history, with the supporters of the new music on the one hand, and the tradi-tionalist lobby on the other. In one famous episode in 1947, Ulanov organised a battle of the bands on radio, with his own hand-picked selec-tion of bebop players led by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie going up against the resident band from Rudi Blesh’s This Is Jazz show. Ulanov wrote pioneering studies of Duke Ellington and Bing Crosby in the 1940s and both a his-tory and a handbook of jazz in the 1950s, a de-cade in which he con-tinued to cover jazz for magazines like Down Beat and Esquire, after which he concentrated on his academic inter-ests. *Adapted from The Scotsman* (2000)** See the fuller sketch that appeared in the Barnard Campus News		The Judging of Jazz Barry Ulanov *Chapter 11 of Barry Ulanov, The Handbook of Jazz, Viking Press, 1957, 137-142.* “To make sense out of one’s emotions as they are aroused by jazz, one must be willing to develop a kind of introspection in which those emotions are constantly subject to rigorous analysis, analysis more intellec-tual than most people like to give their emo-tions. The end product of such self-exami-nation is usually recognition that the border-line between emotions and intellect barely exists, at least as far as the knowing res-ponse to an art is concerned, even to an art that, like jazz, seems so much of the time to be largely directed at the emotions.” —Barry Ulanov For Plato the judging of music was simple: some harmonies were effeminate and convivial, some plaintive, some violent, some tranquil. One was a success or a failure as a composer or performer to the extent that one chose correctly from a small number of modes for a small number of purposes. For us it is a great deal more difficult: there is no such simple identification of sound and purpose for our composing or performing or listening. If our listening is instructed by any set of conventions, it is equally taught by temperament and taste. We rarely react to music the same way twice, even when we have a composer’s declared intention before us and a technical knowledge of what he has accomplished in his music. Now if that is true of performances limited by fixed notes on paper and firm traditions in the execution of those notes, how much more will it be true of jazz, in which each performance is designed to be different from every other! How, then, in a sea of shifting values, in which change seems to be all that is constant, do we ever make judgments? Our most important answer comes, I think, when we recognize that not everything does change in jazz. There are certain elements in jazz sufficiently alike to be called constant, from performance to performance, from school to school, from instrument to instrument. The identification of these elements makes an excellent starting place for any valid value judgment in jazz. Certain of these elements are central to all music. We should be concerned, for example, with identifying the technical background of a performer, in jazz as elsewhere; we must know, through our own ears or those of others, something of a performer’s grasp of harmonic and melodic and rhythmic essentials. Even with the peculiar approach of jazzmen to pitch and color, we should be able to describe with some accuracy the intonation and attack of this or that performer on this or that instrument, or of whole sections or whole bands. It is possible to detect the steadiness or unsteadiness of beat of a jazzman, whether in a rhythm section or not. And finally, even within the enormous restrictions of words, some of the characteristic resonances and timbres of individual players can be sketched in outline, or drawn with some degree of identifying detail. We have in jazz today, too, something that might be called a first cousin to tradition: the variety of styles that have developed around the playing and singing of the blues, around certain New Orleans classics for those who play in the Dixieland tradition, or around songs such as “I Got Rhythm,” “Back Home in Indiana,” “How High the Moon,” “Lullaby of Birdland,” “Moonlight in Vermont,” “Foggy Day,” “Don’t Blame Me,” “Embraceable You,” and “All the Things You Are”—tunes we associate with dozens of different approaches to jazz, from swing to the most advanced jazz counterpoint. In the bop era, with certain sets of figures, such as “Hothouse” and “Donna Lee,” “Groovin’ High,” and “Ko- Ko,” went certain ways of playing, built around the solos of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. In later years other tunes have become permanently attached to other personalities. None perhaps is as irresistibly associated with a performer in the jazz listener’s mind as “Body and Soul” with Coleman Hawkins in the swing era or almost any part of his whole repertory with Charlie Parker today, but all are unmistakably tied to one jazzman or another. All background material can be scrutinized in describing new performances of old tunes; at least as much of it as is clearly relevant can be examined. This may be a nuisance in the normal execution of reviewing duties or in the quick consideration of an addition to one’s record library; but in the more extended evaluation of a significant performer or performance, such comparative history is extremely valuable. Once one has approached the forms of jazz with this many facts in mind, it is possible to indulge fancy. Then one can begin to attack the elusive problems of content in jazz. One can examine the kinds of emotion, no matter how thoroughly personal, that may be elicited by a given piece of music. With all the necessary limitations in mind, one can classify the degrees of excitement or the grades of assuagement; the brightness or fullness of a particular kind of chord; the moods evoked by long melodic lines thoroughly consonant in texture or by more dissonant short ones. One may discover that a certain solidity in scoring or a particular looseness will correspond to some sequence of emotions. One may find that incisive statements of melody are bracing or that diffuse ones cause the attention to wander and utterly disengage the emotions. This is an intensely subjective set of responses to jazz that I have been describing, but it is a very important one. It involves highly individual thresholds of pleasure and pain, very personal definitions of musical right and wrong, and assertions of taste and distaste of which there may be as many as there are listeners to jazz. To make sense out of one’s emotions as they are aroused by jazz, one must be willing to develop a kind of introspection in which those emotions are constantly subject to rigorous analysis, analysis more intellectual than most people like to give their emotions. The end product of such self-examination is usually recognition that the borderline between emotions and intellect barely exists, at least as far as the knowing response to an art is concerned, even to an art that, like jazz, seems so much of the time to be largely directed at the emotions. Sooner or later one does recognize, in any serious attempt to organize one’s reactions to jazz, that this is a highly intellectual procedure which requires unfailing self-discipline not unlike that to which the jazz musician regularly subjects himself. The inspiration for such discipline must ultimately be the quality of the music itself and the conviction that there really are high technical standards in jazz, supported by sensitive performers who have a clear goal to which their performances can and should be directed. What is the goal of the jazz musician? If it can be named, obviously much of what we have been talking about can be examined in the light of a jazzman’s success or failure in reaching that goal and in terms of a jazz listener’s ability to follow him along the way. It is audacious to attempt to define any simple, uniform goal as the end purpose of all jazz musicians. Nevertheless it is an attempt I must make, for it seems clear to me that whatever other intentions may outwardly occupy the jazzman’s playing and inwardly command his thinking and feeling about his music, one central concern animates him beyond all others. This can be summed up in a word that is familiar enough: development. Jazz, in common with a great many other arts in our time, has ceaselessly exercised itself over the need to go forward. To make progress is the great aim of most jazz musicians today. No dimension of time holds such allure for them as the future; no condemnation seems so terrible to them as that of being “dated.” At its worst this preoccupation with forward movement settles into a debilitating courtship of the merely novel in jazz. At its best it accounts for a profound probing of materials which can make a close encounter with the jazzman’s mind a remarkably stimulating experience. No matter how ruthlessly the well-equipped self-analyst in jazz disposes of the recent past as archaic or outmoded; no matter how warped his historical sense, he does have firm hold on the central fact about jazz: it is an improvised music. It is here that judgment becomes arduous, if not altogether frustrating. Here we must ask questions about the construction of a jazz performance that are almost unanswerable, sending us back again and again to the performance itself. No matter how willing the performer may be to talk about what he has done, he will not easily find the words to describe his achievement if it really is an achievement; the music will have to speak for itself. It is best, then, at this point to recognize the limitations of the jazz musician, the jazz critic, the jazz audience. We can make statements about certain fixed technical elements in jazz. We can establish some comparative history in the performance of a tune or construction of a style or development of a playing personality. We can make some effort to sort out our own emotional responses to the music. Then we must come to this element of the jazz musician’s self-examination, his self-development, his relentless concern with the materials of jazz and his conquest of them. Jazz may not always be so deeply engrossed in the examination of itself. But as it stands now, any judgment of this music must ultimately face this fact—and not only face it but be pleased with it. Anyone who wants to spend much time with jazz must recognize that almost all of a jazz musician’s energies and talents are directed toward the systematic exploration of his music and hence of himself. No figure so well sums up the position of the modern jazzman as the seated Buddha thoughtfully observing his navel. If this sort of preoccupation, thoroughly self-centered in the fascination the performer finds in his own personality and at the same time selfless in the jazzman’s analytical concern for the whole art of music—if this sort of concentration in any way offends one, then one ought to begin one’s judgment of jazz by judging oneself uninterested.