Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1917-09-02


 i've of a band. The group that play
 for dancing, when colored, seem in
 fected with the virus that they try to
 instill as stimulus in others. They
 shake and jump and writhe in the
 ways to suggest return os the medl- acvil jumping mania. The word, ac- cording to Walter Kingsley, famous
 in the ranks of vaudeville, is various
 ly spelled jas. jass, jag, jazz. and jacsz; and is African in origin. Laf- cadiO Hearn, we are told. found the
 word in the Creole patios and idiom of New Orleans and reported that it
 meant speeding up things The Creoles had taken it from the blacks.
 and applied it to music of rudi mcntary syncopated type.' In the New York Sun, MT. Kingsley rehear'
 ses many of the curious facts and customs associated with the word:
 "In the old plantation days, when
 the slaves were having one of theif
 rare holidays and the fun languinshed
 some West-Coast African would cry
 out, Jag her up,' and this would be
 the cue for fast and furious fun. NO
 doubt the witch-doctors and medicine
 men on the Congo used the same term
 at those jungle parties when tom toms throbbed and the sturdy warrl-
 ors gave their pep an added kick
 with rich brews of Yoilimbin bark
 that precious product of the kamer-
 uns. Curiously enough the phrase
 Jag her up is a common one today
 in vaudeville and on the circus lot.
 When vaudeville act needs ginger
 the cry from the advisers in the
 wings is put ill jaz.' meaning add
 low comedy, go to high speed and ac- cclerate the comedy spark, Jasbo' IS
 form of the word common in the va
 rieties, meaning the same as 'hokum',
 or low comedy verging on vulgarlty.
 Jazz music is the delirium tremens of syncopation. Today the jazz bands
 take popular tunes and rag them to death to mako the jazz. Beats are added as often as the dclicacy of the players car will permit. In one-two time third beat is in1erploated. There are many half notes and many long-drawn, wavering tones. It is an attempt to reproduce the marvel ous syncopation of the African jun gle" Contribution is drawn from Prof. Wm. Morrison Pattersons pioneer ing experimental investigation of the individual difference in rythm." | Thus:
 ""The music of contemporary saw age-, taunts us with lost art or rythm. Modern sophistication has I inhibited many native instincts, and the mere fact that our conventional dignity usually forbids us to sway our bodies or to tap our feet when we hear effective music has deprived us of unsuspected pleasures Prof. Pat terson goes on to say that the ear keenly sensible of the wild rythms has | 'rythmic aggressiveness. Therefore of all moderns the jazz musicians and their auditors have tEe most rythmlc aggressiveness, for jazz IS based on | the savage musician's wonderful gift for progressive retarding and accel- cration guided by his sense of swing He finds syncopation easy and pleas
 ant. He plays to an inner series Of timc-beats joyfully elastic because not necessarily grouped in succession of twos and threes. The highly gift ! ed jazz artist can get away with five beats where there were two before. ! Of course, besides the thirty-seconds scored for the tympani in some of the modern Russian music. this doesn't seem so intricate, but just try to beat ! In between beats on your kettle-drum and make rythm and you will think better of it. To be highbroW and quote Professor Patterson once more: "sWith these elastic military pulses any haphazard series by means Of syncopation can be readily, because instinctively. co-ordinated. The result is that a rythmic tune compounded of time and stress and pitch relations is created, the chief characteristic Of which is likely to be complicated synccpation. An arabesque of accent ual differences, group-fl aming in their nature. is superimIosed upon ] the fundamental time divisions.
 "Thcre is jazz precisely defined as result of months of laboratory ex- perimentine in drum-beatinS and syn ccpation. The law that governs jazz rule in the rythms of great original prose, verse that sings itself. and opera ultra modernity. Imagine Wal ter Eater, Swinburne and Borodin swaying to the same pulses that rule the moonlit music on the banks Of African rivers"
 For years, we arc told. jazz has rul- ed in the underworld resorts of New Orleans. It has emancipated itself in part from it's original surround ings:
 "There in those wonderful refuges
 of basic folklore and primeval pas sion wild men and wild women have
 danced to jazz for gladsome genera
 tions. Ragtime and the new dances | came from there. and long after jazz
 crcpt slowly up the Mississippi from resort to resort until it landed in South Chicago at Freiburs's, whither it had been preceded by the various
 stanzas of Must Hesitatc?' The
 Blues Frankie and Johnnie,' and other classics of the levee under | world that stir the savage in Us with Il sI...,<