Jazz and Jews

[Michael A.G.]

I am the author of a new book titled Kosher Jammers: Jewish connections in jazz -- Volume 1 the USA. What follows is an article that Cadence - the journal of improvised music - commissioned me to write that summarises the book's main themes. 

 

Jazz Jews feature for Cadence, author Mike Gerber copyright 2024 

 Jazz writer Martin Williams, in conversation with Charlie Parker’s one-time producer Ross Russell, disclosed something tantalisingly inconclusive; he said: “I think it was a sociologist who did some kind of tabulation about the ethnic and national backgrounds of jazz musicians. Of course Negroes were first. And I think next were Jews, next Italians … After that, things came down to such a scarcity that it didn’t mean much, as I remember.”

   Whether Jews really have produced, after African Americans, more jazz musicians than other minorities I’m aware have figured prominently, I would hesitate to say. 

  As Dan Morgenstern however told me, before he retired as director of the Institute of Jazz Studies, and as cited in my new book, Kosher Jammers: “Jazz reflects the idea of America as a melting pot because minorities made such an enormous contribution to this music, it comes out of the encounter between the African and the European – that’s a kind of shorthand, it’s over-simplified, but what does that European influence mean? It means Irish, Jewish, Italian, Spanish. And if you look at American jazz musicians, minorities really play a dominant role.” 

  Jews and black Americans were precluded from entry to certain professions until well into the twentieth century, so many found advancement in entertainment, including popular music, the Jews as entrepreneurs as well as musicians.

  Dr Bruce Raeburn has shown that New Orleans Jewish musicians were involved in jazz in its embryonic stage, and the Jewish presence became more pronounced when the music gravitated to Chicago and New York. But they were not yet nearly numerous enough to warrant an assumption rapidly formulating in the public mind, and propounded by cultural commentators, that jazz and Jews were somehow intimately connected. 

  One point of confusion was the 1924 premiere of Rhapsody in Blue that the commissioning bandleader Paul Whiteman hyped as “making a lady out of jazz”. George Gershwin, its Jewish composer, made no such claim as far as I’m aware; he was upfront about his adoration of jazz, blues and other black music forms that, peppered with a touch of Jewish, inspired Rhapsody, his other classical works, and his popular songs.

  Another epochal event was the 1927 first talkie movie The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, America’s most popular singer-entertainer of the era. It is a saga about Jewish assimilation in Jazz Age America in which jazz, as imperfectly understood, is the medium through which the Jolson character transcends the shtetl mentality of his fictional cantor father. Few today would mistake Jolson, whose actual father was a cantor, for a genuine jazz singer, but the movie consolidated the conviction that Jews were responsible for the popularisation of black music. 

  Blacks, Jews, and an establishment-defying new genre – a combination guaranteed to spook the bigots, among them motoring mogul Henry Ford, as ranted in his article ‘Jewish Jazz – Moron Music – Becomes our National Music’. 

  It was published in 1921 when urban American popular music was fast mutating, becoming blacker in inspiration, also more than a touch Jewish as Jewish songwriters were so heavily involved. 

  Most “Great American Songbook” tunes, so called, were composed between about 1910, when jazz was germinating out of an earlier syncopated form, ragtime, and the mid-fifties, when rock erupted on the scene. And the best songbook tunes, although rarely written with jazz in mind, have attained the status of jazz standards, beloved by generations of jazz musicians, whether adhering close to the melody, improvising mainly on the harmonies, or constructing their own melodic line over the chord changes. 

   In Kosher Jammers, I’ve dedicated an extensive chapter to consideration of whether songbook standards can be said to have contributed to the way jazz evolved. My reason for doing so was because Jewish songwriters were so prolific that they even influenced non-Jewish peers such as Cole Porter.

  I referenced www.jazzstandards.com, which lists the top thousand most recorded standards, and discovered that six of the top ten standards were composed by Jewish songwriters – headed by Johnny Green’s ‘Body and Soul’ – nearly half the top hundred were, and around a third of the top thousand. 

  Among those I contacted was Gunther Schuller, whose Jazz: Its Roots and Early Development and The Swing Era are musicological studies of the way jazz progressed before bebop. As nowhere in them is there any indication that the songbook might have played some part in that evolution, I asked him if that contribution had been underestimated. 

  Schuller agreed: “I think the great American songwriters contributed enormously, although, as you say, inadvertently to developments in jazz. Not so much in its sound, but in its harmonic and structural developments beyond and away from primarily the blues and simplistic early New Orleans and ragtime standards.” These songs, Schuller added, “forced improvising jazz musicians to expand their ears to wider ranging harmonic, more modulating progressions, and in turn expanded their creative horizons”. 

  By the mid-1930s, when jazz went mainstream with the popularity of big swing bands, it was Jewish clarinettist Benny Goodman who led the charge thanks to his band’s exposure on coast-to-coast American radio. It is to Goodman’s credit therefore that, with his patrician mentor John Hammond’s encouragement, he determined that the centrality of the African American in the development of jazz should be publicly recognised. Goodman, who’d grown up in poverty in Chicago, risked his success, during the acute economic depression, to hire black artists, engaging Fletcher Henderson to create arrangements for his big band, while in his small satellite combos, African American artists were given starring roles.

  When Goodman announced plans to include pianist Teddy Wilson and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton on a tour down south, DownBeat magazine predicted a race riot. In the event, audiences swallowed their prejudices and acclaimed the artists.

  Morgenstern has pointed up how significant was Goodman’s racial breakthrough, jazz the first publicly integrated sector of American life a decade before Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers baseball team.

 Jewish clarinettist Artie Shaw, Goodman’s contemporary, went even further by integrating black musicians into his big band, with vocalist Billie Holiday out front. “I just hired them because I wanted them in the band. Hot Lips Page, Billie Holiday – they sounded good,” Shaw told me.

 Nonetheless, I contend that it’s no coincidence that Shaw and Goodman did what they did. Or that Abel Meeropol wrote Billie Holiday’s most famous song, the anti-lynching classic ‘Strange Fruit’, or that the first recording of it was for Milt Gabler’s Commodore, America’s first specialist jazz label, or that Holiday introduced it at Café Society, an integrationist New York jazz club founded by Barney Josephson. Like Shaw and Goodman, Meeropol, Gabler and Josephson were Jewish. 

   So Jews engaged in jazz were at the forefront of efforts to ensure proper recognition for the black artists they idolised. The broader historical context is that, despite inevitable tensions, Jews and their black compatriots were often closely allied in the struggle to bring social justice to the United States. One of my interviewees was black critic Stanley Crouch, whose reflections on African Americans and Jews in American culture and society I found fascinating and illuminating. 

  Jews, Gabler and Josephson among them, can moreover be counted among the most significant facilitators in jazz history. Some others include: Irving Mills – Duke Ellington’s personal manager from 1926 to around 1940, the years during which Ellington forged his international reputation; Joe Glaser – in my book I mainly look at him through his relationship with Louis Armstrong; Alfred Lion and his partner Francis Wolff at Blue Note, the most iconic of all jazz record labels; Orrin Keepnews, co-founder of the Riverside and Milestone labels; Contemporary Records founder Lester Koenig on the west coast; Max Gordon, who owned the Village Vanguard jazz club, and his wife Lorraine who took over when he died; impresario Norman Granz, who was outspoken against any second-class treatment directed at the black artists he engaged. And jazz festival pioneer George Wein, acknowledged by Stanley Crouch as having “promoted more jazz concerts here and abroad and paid the salaries of more jazz artists than anyone in the history of the music”. 

  Most Jewish American jazz musicians have not sought to express their Jewishness in their music – not overtly anyway. Saxophonist Stan Getz said he always sought to sound black, but that it came out sounding Jewish. Several others have spoken in similar terms.

  As for intentional attempts to mesh jazz with Jewish, Yiddish jazz gained fleeting prominence in 1938 when Benny Goodman’s band, with Jewish trumpeter Ziggy Elman featuring a klezmer solo, performed ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen’ at Carnegie Hall. The song, adapted from a New York Jewish musical, became a jazz standard. In recent decades, there has been a proliferation of Jewish-themed jazz – jazz fused not only with klezmer, but also with liturgical music, with music from the Judeo-Hispanic Ladino tradition, and with Jewish music that originated in the middle east and north Africa. And the radical Jewish music composed and curated by John Zorn, much of it jazz related, has become widely appreciated beyond just the Jewish community.

 Kosher Jammers: Jewish connections in jazz -- Volume 1 the USA, by Mike Gerber (Vinyl Vanguard, 2024). Paperback ISBN 9798224744800 (406 pages); ePub ISBN 9798223775706