Books, Arts & Manners: The Vintage Jazz

For musicologist and aficionado alike, it has been one of the felicities of history that jazz and the phonograph developed together. To a degree, therefore, it is not necessary to rely on the nostalgia-wrapped accounts of how jazz shed its swaddling clothes and moved up the Mississippi to Chicago and then eastward to New York. The old recordings are there. That is not to say that these recordings are entirely faithful to the music they reproduce. Playing into an acoustic horn was no way to preserve in its vitality the tone, timbre, and dynamics of what was being produced in the very early 1920s. It was not until the late years of the decade that recording techniques began to approximate what was going on in the studio, and many more years before those techniques reached any level of high fidelity. The engineers can do wonders with an old Okeh or Gennett, but they cannot put into them what was not on the masters.

Yet enough comes through of the melodic and harmonic content of early jazz to make for memorable listening. We are there almost at the creation. And with the passage of time, the jazz aficionado is getting more and more of that creation through the efforts of the Smithsonian Institution in bringing together the vintage recordings and transferring them to LP vinyl. Album by. album, the jazz of the 1920s and 1930s is being delivered to the moldy figs—a term of affection and derogation for those whose focus remains on the early jazz.

RT

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Ralph de Toledano

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For musicologist and aficionado alike, it has been one of the felicities of history that jazz and the phonograph developed together. To a degree, therefore, it is not necessary to rely on the nostalgia-wrapped accounts of how jazz shed its swaddling clothes and moved up the Mississippi to Chicago and then eastward to New York. The old recordings are there. That is not to say that these recordings are entirely faithful to the music they reproduce. Playing into an acoustic horn was no way to preserve in its vitality the tone, timbre, and dynamics of what was being produced in the very early 1920s. It was not until the late years of the decade that recording techniques began to approximate what was going on in the studio, and many more years before those techniques reached any level of high fidelity. The engineers can do wonders with an old Okeh or Gennett, but they cannot put into them what was not on the masters.

Yet enough comes through of the melodic and harmonic content of early jazz to make for memorable listening. We are there almost at the creation. And with the passage of time, the jazz aficionado is getting more and more of that creation through the efforts of the Smithsonian Institution in bringing together the vintage recordings and transferring them to LP vinyl. Album by. album, the jazz of the 1920s and 1930s is being delivered to the moldy figs—a term of affection and derogation for those whose focus remains on the early jazz.