prankishly charming Rapsodie nègre, full of pseudo-African mumbo jumbo on the order of “Banana lou ito kous kous / pota la ma Honoloulou.”
There is no need to belabor the point that le jazz was condescending toward its African-American sources. Cocteau and Poulenc were enjoying a one-night stand with a dark-skinned form, and they had no intention of striking up a conversation with it the following day. Baroque pastiches, Cubist geometries, or the music of machines could just as well express modern, urban, non-Teutonic values, which is why the craze quickly ran its course, at least among Paris composers. Yet they did learn significant lessons from jazz, even if their music only faintly resembled the real thing.
Among Les Six, the most alert practitioner of le jazz was Darius Milhaud, an ebullient man with a wide-open mind who wrote a memoir with the unlikely title My Happy Life. Milhaud had spent the last years of World War I on a diplomatic mission to Brazil, where he made regular excursions into the teeming nightlife of Rio de Janeiro and received a crucial education in how “art” and “pop” motifs could be reconciled. In these same years the young Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos was merging rhythmic ideas from Stravinsky with complex patterns that he had detected in Afro-Brazilian music. In neoprimitivist scores such as Amazonas and Uirapuru, Villa-Lobos wrote percussion parts of riotous intensity; Milhaud, likewise, used no fewer than nineteen percussion instruments in his brightly colored ballet Man and His Desire. He also produced two dazzling fantasies on Brazilian motifs, Saudades do Brasil and Le Boeuf sur le toit.
Because Latin American musicians had originated many of the tricky rhythms that figured in early jazz, Milhaud made an easy transition to jazz-based writing. When he returned to Paris, in 1919, he maintained the habit of ending his week with a night on the town. He would invite fellow composers and like-minded artists to his home for Saturday dinner, then lead them out into the wilderness of the modern city—“the steam-driven merry-go-rounds, the mysterious booths, the Daughter of Mars, the shooting-galleries, the games of chance, the menageries, the din of the mechanical organs with their perforated rolls seeming to grind out simultaneously and implacably all the blaring tunes from the music halls and revues.”
When the Saturday-evening crowd grew too large to handle, Milhaud moved his soiree to a wine store on rue Duphot, in a room named Bar Gaya. The pianist Jean Wiéner, who had been working in nightclubs, set the tone by playing jazz-like music with an African-American saxophonist named Vance Lowry. Soon the audience got too big again, and the club settled on rue Boissy d’Anglas, where it took the name Le Boeuf sur le Toit, in honor of Milhaud’s Brazilian showpiece. Virgil Thomson described it as “a not unamusing place frequented by English upper-class bohemians, wealthy Americans, French aristocrats, lesbian novelists from Roumania, Spanish princes, fashionable pederasts, modern literary & musical figures, pale and precious young men, and distinguished diplomats towing bright-eyed youths.” Everyone from Picasso to Maurice Chevalier joined the hilarity. Cocteau sometimes sat in on drums.
In early 1923, Milhaud made his first trip to America. Paul Whiteman’s plush orchestral jazz was at that time the sensation of American high society, but Milhaud avoided it; like Bartók in the Carpathian Mountains, he sought the genuine article. At a Harlem joint called the Capitol Palace, where the stride pianists Willie “The Lion” Smith and James P. Johnson were in residence and the young Duke Ellington would shortly be indoctrinated into the Harlem elite, Milhaud was stunned by the unadulterated power of the blues. Of the singers who were in town in this period, the great Bessie Smith best fits the description in the composer’s memoirs: “Against the beat of the drums the melodic lines criss crossed in a breathless pattern of broken and twisted rhythms. A Negress whose grating voice seemed to come from the depths of the centuries sang in front of the various tables. With despairing pathos and dramatic feeling she sang over and over again, to the point of exhaustion, the same refrain, to which the constantly changing melodic pattern of the orchestra wove a kaleidoscopic background.”
The language is revealing: it could describe the Rite. Indeed, Milhaud is replicating, consciously or not, a phrase from Cocteau’s 1918 description of the ballet: “Little melodies arrive from the depths of the centuries.” Also revealing is the fact that Milhaud did not record the singer’s name.
Milhaud summed up his exotic adventures in the African-chic spectacle The Creation of the World, which the Swedish Ballet presented in Paris in 1923, with a scenario by the Simultaneist poet Blaise Cendrars and sets and costumes by the Cubist innovator Fernand Léger. None of the participants had deep knowledge of Africa, but Milhaud’s score rises above art nègre stereo types on the strength of its elegant intermingling of Bach and jazz: in the opening passage of the overture, trumpets dance languidly over a saxophone-laced Baroque continuo. On his Latin-American travels, Milhaud had encountered the music of the Cuban danzón composer Antonio María Romeu, who liked to frame syncopated dances in Bachian counterpoint. He may also have heard Villa-Lobos speculating about common ground between Brazilian folk music and the classical canon—an idea that would eventually generate Villa-Lobos’s great sequence of Bachianas Brasileiras. Later, the notion of a pan-historical conversation between Bach and jazz would be taken up by the likes of Bud Powell, John Lewis, Jacques Loussier, and Dave Brubeck, the last of whom studied with Milhaud and drew inspiration from his work. Milhaud became a link in a long chain, connecting centuries of tradition with new popular forms.
Stravinsky, too, cocked an ear to jazz. His guide was the conductor Ernest Ansermet, who toured America with the Ballets Russes in 1916 and wrote excitedly to Stravinsky about the “unheard-of music” that he was encountering in cafés. ( Just as the Ballets Russes was arriving for its tour, the Creole Band, pioneers and popularizers of New Orleans jazz, was playing at the Winter Garden in New York. Later that year, the jazz historian Lawrence Gushee reveals, both the Ballets Russes and the Creole Band played on the same night in Omaha, Nebraska.) Ansermet brought back to Switzerland a pile of recordings and sheet music, including, possibly, Jelly Roll Morton’s “Jelly Roll Blues.” Stravinsky played some of these for Romain Rolland, calling them “the musical ideal, music spontaneous and ‘useless,’ music that wishes to express nothing.” (“Dance must express nothing,” Cocteau had written to him back in 1914.) If nothingness wasn’t really what Jelly Roll had in mind, it did explain why so many people responded to jazz during the last bloody years of the Great War: it offered a clean slate to a shellshocked culture.
In 1918, Stravinsky wrote a puppet-theater piece titled Histoire du soldat, or Story of a Soldier, which had a decisive influence on younger composers in France, America, and Germany. It is a down-to-earth Faustian tale of a soldier-fiddler who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for untold riches. Later, Stravinsky would tell the New York press that the instrumentation was copied from jazz ensembles, and, indeed, the combination of violin, cornet, trombone, clarinet, bassoon, double bass, and percussion resembles the makeup of the Creole Band (which had a guitar in place of a bassoon). The first scene of Histoire starts with a simple, plucked, one-two-three-four pulse. The violin breaks up and rearranges this beat, entering on a four, then on a three, then on a two, in a triplet motion, then in phrases of five and three, then in yet more complicated phrases of odd-numbered beats. The interplay between a pulsing bass figure and freewheeling solos suggests a café-band performance, though perhaps not of jazz as such.
As Stravinsky later confessed, Histoire was a Russian émigré’s dream of jazz, rather than a reflection of the real thing. Of course, he had written the Rite the same way, assembling a fantasy world from scraps of evidence.
By official reckoning, le jazz lasted all of three years. Cocteau called it to a halt in 1920, announcing “the disappearance of the skyscraper” and the “reappearance of the rose.” That same year Auric explained in the pages of the journal Le Coq that his piece Adieu New-York, a fox-trot for piano, was his farewell to jazz, which had served its purpose. Auric’s new slogan was “Bonjour Paris!” By 1927, even Milhaud had lost interest in the mysteries of Harlem. “Already the influence of jazz has passed,” he wrote, “like a beneficial storm that leaves behind a clear sky and stable weather.”
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