animus aside, the claim is not far off the mark: much of the music that white audiences of the twenties would have considered “jazz” came from the pens of Jewish composers. Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Richard Rodgers all came from Central European, Eastern European, and Russian Jewish backgrounds, and all made prolific use of African-American material. Scholars have tracked the surprising ways in which the modes and syncopations of Eastern European klezmer music and of African-American music overlap. Pace Varèse, the music of Kern and Gershwin was American precisely because it mixed cultures—and genres—in a creatively indiscriminate way.
Jewish Americans’ identification with black music might have had something to do with inherited memories of European suffering. Old Testament metaphors appear all through the African-American spirituals: “Tell ole Pharaoh / Let my people go,” “Ezekiel saw de wheel of time / Wheel in de middle of a wheel,” “Deep river, my home is over Jordan.” The composer Constant Lambert, in his 1934 book Music Ho!, was among the first to discuss what he called a “link between the exiled and persecuted Jews and the exiled and persecuted Negroes.” Such racial essentialism easily turns ugly: Lambert goes on to say that the Jews had “stolen the Negroes’ thunder,” that they had robbed African-American material of its pure, primitive energy and endowed it with fake sophistication. African-Americans sometimes implied the same thing: Scott Joplin persisted in thinking that Irving Berlin had stolen “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” from Treemonisha, and William Grant Still suspected Gershwin of plagiarism. But these squabbles obscure the reality of the New York scene in the twenties and thirties—that Jewish, African-American, and even Caucasian composers were working shoulder to shoulder, trading ideas, borrowing themes, plundering the past, and feeding off the present.
When Kern’s Show Boat opened at Ziegfeld’s opulent new theater in New York, in December 1927, the audience was stunned into silence by the opening chorus, which was perilously far removed from the dancing girls and witty repartee for which Ziegfeld shows were famed. As the curtain rises, the showboat Cotton Blossom is stage left; stage right, black stevedores are loading bales of hay and singing, “Niggers all work on de Mississippi / Niggers all work while de white man play.” If, as Marva Griffin Carter says, Will Marion Cook’s musicals made “confrontational jabs” at white listeners back at the turn of the century, Kern and his librettist, Oscar Hammerstein II, delivered a slap in the face.
Even riskier is a sequence set at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. A group of threateningly attired black singers perform a deepest-Africa number called “In Dahomey”—the very name of Will Marion Cook’s pioneering musical—and then reveal that they hail from Avenue A in New York. Frederick Douglass had complained that the organizers of the exposition imported African performers to “act the monkey”; Hammerstein’s libretto spells out clearly how black culture was being used to satisfy white audiences’ thirst for the exotic.
If these themes had been fleshed out more fully, Show Boat might have become a masterwork of social satire as well as a bewitching piece of theater. But, as the scholar Raymond Knapp points out, the creators could hardly address such an incendiary subject while they were keeping their black characters in subsidiary roles, on the margins of the drama. African-American suffering becomes a sort of background decor, an ambience of heartbreak.
What ever its failings as a study in race relations, Show Boat provided a grand aerial view of the American musical scene. The first thing you hear is a blaring, minatory minor chord out of Verdi or Puccini. That operatic gesture quickly fades away into a rapid montage of popular styles: Tin Pan Alley melody, mass-market blues, banjo strummings, Gilbert and Sullivan ditties, Sousa marches, vaudeville patter, and hoochie-coochie music. The one song from Show Boat that everyone knows is, of course, “Ol’ Man River,” and they know it because of the way Paul Robeson sang it. Show Boat was not only the first major American musical but the first musical in which black performers were given showstopping moments. Robeson became, in effect, the co-composer of the song, transforming a resigned, melancholy number into a vessel of spiritual might. In later years he changed the lyric “Ah’m tired of livin’ an’ scared of dyin’” to “I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’.”
Humbly putting his music in the service of such august voices, Kern let white Americans know that there was more to black music than bouncing syncopation. Coursing under the zesty surface of Show Boat is the power of the blues.
Gershwin
“I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise,” George Gershwin said, explaining the origins of Rhapsody in Blue. Epitomizing the Jazz Age in every pore of his suave being, Gershwin was the ultimate phenomenon in early-twentieth-century American music, the man in whom all the discordant tendencies of the era achieved sweet harmony.
Gershwin grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, that superheated melting pot where Russian, Eastern European, Yiddish, African-American, and mainstream American cultures intermingled. He experienced what he called his “flashing revelation” in the schoolyard of P.S. 25; in the middle of playing ball with other kids, he was stopped cold by the sound of a fellow student playing Dvořák’s Humoresque. There is a poignant historical symmetry here, because Dvořák had based his Humoresque on the American Plantation Dances of his young student Maurice Arnold, one of those would-be black composers who had dropped from sight.
Life on the Lower East Side could be tough for a middle-class kid who liked to play the piano. Gershwin’s early biographers, wanting to establish their subject’s all-American credentials, emphasized his boisterous, mildly delinquent escapades—roller-skating, skipping school, joining street brawls, dabbling in petty burglary. Gershwin stumbled into music by accident, it was said, and never had to work particularly hard. In fact, the boy spent endless hours practicing, and attended dozens of recitals at Cooper Union, Aeolian Hall, and the Wanamaker Auditorium (in the same department store where Strauss conducted his music in 1904). Gershwin’s childhood scrapbooks, which can be seen in the music collection at the Library of Congress, are stuffed with pictures of favorite pianists and composers, pasted up where other boys might have featured sports heroes or pinup girls.
Gershwin’s first significant teacher was Charles Hambitzer, who introduced him to the music of Debussy and Ravel and possibly to the early works of Schoenberg. Later came a thorough course of theory with the Hungarian émigré Edward Kilenyi, who told Gershwin that he had a better chance of winning an audience if he made his name in the popular arena rather than in the academic realm of composition. (Kilenyi, too, was familiar with Schoenberg, and apparently schooled Gershwin in the teachings of Harmonielehre.) While still a teenager, Gershwin began working as a pianist at Remick’s publishing company, and with the help of Will Vodery, Ziegfeld’s African-American arranger, he got some jobs on Broadway. His first songwriting success—what would remain his biggest hit, in terms of millions of copies sold—came in 1919, when the blackface singer Al Jolson took up the young composer’s rollicking pseudo-Southern number “Swanee.”
Early Gershwin classics like “The Man I Love,” “ ’S Wonderful,” and “Fascinating Rhythm” trumpet the new sophistication of American popular song. Often, a simple repeating figure plays out against a cooler, more complex harmonic background. In “ ’S Wonderful” the chorus melody consists simply of a falling third heard three times, followed by a falling fifth, spelling out a common chord. Nothing could be simpler—or, potentially, duller. It’s a mere signal, like a ditty that plays when subway doors are closing. The wonderfulness is in the harmonization: that inert third becomes the pivot for a graceful merry-go-round of major, minor, dominant-seventh, and diminished-seventh chords.
“Fascinating Rhythm” is a study in aural sleight of hand. Over a foursquare beat, the melody unfolds in three helter-skelter phrases, each made up of six eighth notes plus an eighth-note rest. The fact that each phrase falls one eighth note short of a complete bar means that the vocal keeps slipping ahead of the main beat; four extra pulses are needed to make up the difference. So a string of thirty-two pulses is divided into three sets
