Books in Brief: The Bass Saxophone

The Bass Saxophone, by Joseph Skvorecky (Knopf, 209 pp., $8.95). One would not think that jazz, the musical expression of fornication, could be counter-revolutionary. Communism, and Fascism before it, have made it so in real life. The epigraph to this book quotes poet Langston Hughes: “ ‘But jazz is decadent bourgeois music,’ I was told, for that is what the Soviet Press has hammered into Russian heads. ‘It’s my music,’ I said, ‘and I wouldn’t give up jazz for a world revolution.’ ” The leitmotif is the music of the anachronistic bass saxophone, no avantgarde instrument, but a dinosaur left over from German musical history, fallen into the hands of raggle-taggle jazz maniacs. This lumbering musical equivalent of a Junker bomber is here a symbol of all the wild music outlawed by Nazis and Reds. In a remarkable preface, Skvorecky, a defector and now a professor at the University of Toronto, documents a wondrous anti-jazz Decalogue issued by a German Gauleiter, binding on all dance orchestras. It is a worthy contribution to the history of music. Among its strictures are: “at most 10 per cent syncopation; the remainder must be of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical reverses characteristic of the music of the barbarian races . . . also prohibited are the so-called drum breaks longer than half a bar in four-quarter beat . . . the double bass must be played solely with the bow . . . plucking the strings is prohibited . . .” (What pertains to the title of this book is the restriction on “saxophones of all keys.”) When this Decalogue was published in Czechoslovakia’s first jazz almanac, “the censors of an entirely different dictatorship confiscated the entire edition.” The script of a film based on all this—the first film by Milos Forman—“was personally banned by the man who was at that time the power in the country, President Novotny [the Communist boss]. Why? Because the decrees of the old Gauleiter were once again in force, this time in the land of the victorious proletariat.” To go with the counter-revolutionary message, Skvorecky writes in a counter-involutionary style, rich as the architecture of Austria and Gaudi’s Barcelona. When he writes of his music he is not, to use Boethius’s distinction, a mere possessor of peritia, of technical skill; he has true sapientia. Embouchure is not his concern: the effect of the music (even when demented) concerns him as universal novelist. And he does know the difference. His music is “not a gate of art,” it may even be “lacking in profundity or exalted emotion” he concedes. He is not writing about music as art, but music as life. Every page yields rococo sentences of bittersweet poignancy.

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Anthony Kerrigan

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The Bass Saxophone, by Joseph Skvorecky (Knopf, 209 pp., $8.95). One would not think that jazz, the musical expression of fornication, could be counter-revolutionary. Communism, and Fascism before it, have made it so in real life. The epigraph to this book quotes poet Langston Hughes: “ ‘But jazz is decadent bourgeois music,’ I was told, for that is what the Soviet Press has hammered into Russian heads. ‘It’s my music,’ I said, ‘and I wouldn’t give up jazz for a world revolution.’ ” The leitmotif is the music of the anachronistic bass saxophone, no avantgarde instrument, but a dinosaur left over from German musical history, fallen into the hands of raggle-taggle jazz maniacs. This lumbering musical equivalent of a Junker bomber is here a symbol of all the wild music outlawed by Nazis and Reds. In a remarkable preface, Skvorecky, a defector and now a professor at the University of Toronto, documents a wondrous anti-jazz Decalogue issued by a German Gauleiter, binding on all dance orchestras. It is a worthy contribution to the history of music. Among its strictures are: “at most 10 per cent syncopation; the remainder must be of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical reverses characteristic of the music of the barbarian races . . . also prohibited are the so-called drum breaks longer than half a bar in four-quarter beat . . . the double bass must be played solely with the bow . . . plucking the strings is prohibited . . .” (What pertains to the title of this book is the restriction on “saxophones of all keys.”) When this Decalogue was published in Czechoslovakia’s first jazz almanac, “the censors of an entirely different dictatorship confiscated the entire edition.” The script of a film based on all this—the first film by Milos Forman—“was personally banned by the man who was at that time the power in the country, President Novotny [the Communist boss]. Why? Because the decrees of the old Gauleiter were once again in force, this time in the land of the victorious proletariat.” To go with the counter-revolutionary message, Skvorecky writes in a counter-involutionary style, rich as the architecture of Austria and Gaudi’s Barcelona. When he writes of his music he is not, to use Boethius’s distinction, a mere possessor of peritia, of technical skill; he has true sapientia. Embouchure is not his concern: the effect of the music (even when demented) concerns him as universal novelist. And he does know the difference. His music is “not a gate of art,” it may even be “lacking in profundity or exalted emotion” he concedes. He is not writing about music as art, but music as life. Every page yields rococo sentences of bittersweet poignancy.