# The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Musical Chronicle (November 1923)

MUSICAL CHRONICLE
JAZZ is a series of jerks. In rhythm, you do not have to be conscious of the one two, one two; or of the one two three, one two three. Not even in Mendelssohn. But in jazz, to get your pleasure, you have to count the beat. Because jazz is every old thing which has ever been, distorted. Anticipated a little; suspended a little. It is the most banal with tobasco sauce; beans with ketchup plentifully. Ten minutes of it used as entertainment, makes a bore. For dance music, it cannot compare with Viennese waltzes. You do not even have to go to Johann Strauss. Waldteufel, flat as he is.
But some people in Paris talk of the rhythms of jazz. Three times in a century, to gratify some vaguest longing—people in Paris have dreamed fantasies, and called them by the name of America. First, nostalgic Chateaubriand and the Natchez. The Apollo in the hide of the "peau rouge." Second, Baudelaire and the great pale American Christ. The great pallid American Christ wandering the streets of New York was Edgar Allan Poe. Third, certain fatigued contemporaries who, more or less because Marinetti stood on the prow of a dreadnaught in a Byronic frame of mind, mistake material brutishly used in America for primitive art. A steel-construction with Antwerp plastered over its flanks is architecture. "The Parthenon was built for use." The Parthenon, with the plumb of its columns subtly varied that the eye may be enchanted! Then, Charlot, Fattie, and Mees Pearrrl White. The Saturday Evening insensibility as the American story. And jazz. The rhythms of jazz.
One wonders: have any of these charming dreamers ever seen or heard the objects they mistake for beauty, or clarity, or significance? They have seen Charlot. And, no doubt, his films are much funnier than the shows in Paris, though you do see some very funny ones at the Théâtre Nationale de l'Opéra, and at the Maison de Molière. But what is it they have really seen and heard? Some people opened a little place off the Place de la Madeleine, and Cocteau, who had made quite a success with the pieces of the battery in the performance of Milhaud's Choephores, insisted on play​ing something which he qualified with the name "Jazz Americain." A great many ladies heard, and seemed greatly edified at having finally gotten the real right thing. But some friends, American—persuaded Cocteau to desist. And still, jazz is the American music, or the chrysalis of American music. And the machine and its products—must be accepted.
This Gerald Stanley Lee, Marinetti categorical imperative, has no importance for any one doing work either in the field of mechanics or that of art. The creative mechanic no more than the artist "accepts" the machine. Like his poetical brother, he has in his mind an ideal objective. And for the purpose of approaching that objective, he makes friends with his instrument, and drives it relentlessly to the limit of its capacities. There have always been machines, since ever the first humanoid took up a club and began freeing his mind; and between the man who drives the machine relentlessly to its limit and the man who tells a perfect story, there is no opposition. Both are driven by the selfsame need, the need of things of quality enrooted in the living human breast. Both are moving toward the same ideal goal. Neither is responsible for the mess rotting modern life. Responsible for that are, far more, the people moved by no ideal objective. The good-enough people in the field of machine-work. And the people who sit about, and talk.
Whether French people wanted us to be savages or no would be of no matter in the United States; all the talk of skyscraper primitive art would be harmless, were work proceeding here, and voices calling. The existing machinery, jazz, Charlie Chaplin, would find the artist, for the artist never has to go find the raw stuff of nature. But there is no faith among the American workers; and in all ages wanting inner direction, a subjective sense of inferiority drives men to searching for ready-made formulae before starting off on their adventures; and to playing up to the eyes of certain people whom they take pleasure in conceiving as superior to themselves. It is for this reason that the charming fantasies of contemporary France seem to us to contain a principle dangerous to the young art-men in America. These fantasies are supplying a number of embryonic artists with cheap formulae, keeping them from working from their sensibilities. They are also persuading a number of incipient advertising-men that they have something to ​do with art, preventing them using their talents properly in selling tomato-sauce and soap. No doubt, the will to worship a lot of quarter-baked material will eventually be discarded by the determined artists, and lead the incipient advertisers to flattering millionaires more directly, and building up circulation for frankly millionaire-flattering journals. But much breath will go lost. And we have so little breath to lose.
Paul Rosenfeld