Frank Kogan

Wrote this on the BLEUGH thread in response to Mark's answers; probably makes more sense in context:

Think you and I might be talking past each other a bit on my Question 3. Yes, radio and the new record formats play a driving role, but nonetheless certain musical elements are highlighted as "jazz" more in the '50s than previously, and others suppressed (though not by everybody); of course, this is hardly independent of the needs of the record companies — as you point out, long vamping fits the new LP.

But what's really of concern for me isn't just the reconfiguration in the '50s (and my account suppresses the fact that there are earlier reconfigurations as well, for example that caused by the introduction of the word "swing"), but also (i) the backwards reconfiguration whereby what constitutes the history of jazz is also narrowed and made more consistent, and (ii) the question as to what in the '50s and early '60s your seven albums likely won't get us to.

To look at ii briefly, is there a way that any of your seven albums can lead someone to, say, the guitar solo in "Rock Around The Clock"? To Dinah Washington? I don't know, only having listened to several of your recommendations so far. And it isn't a defect of the list if none of them do, just an indication of where you're aiming. It wouldn't be a serviceable jazz list if it led to all music in the history of the world.

The back-configuring is more interesting. Louis remains indisputably a jazz master in the reconfiguration, but what makes him a jazz master probably reconfigures. E.g., the solo at the start of the 1928 "West End Blues" becomes significant for, among other things, foreshadowing bop. But I don't think jazz history makes as big a deal of his, say, popularizing a body of song. Whiteman keeps a foot in the history of jazz for fostering Bix Beiderbecke but not for fostering Bing Crosby. Benny Goodman becomes more significant for having employed Charlie Christian than for having made popular dance music. And so forth.

I'm hardly against such reconfiguring, which is about people inventing the parentage that they most need. And I'm not against our inventing and twisting terminology any way we want to if it helps us understand the past. But inventing parentage and understanding the past are different projects: inventing parentage is really about the future.

Now this takes us afield from what you were trying to do in your post. But to bring up one of my own pet concerns: inventing parentage often creates bad history. I'm too ignorant to put forth any jazz history, but in, for example, thinking of the history of science, Thomas Kuhn is emphatic that one is making a huge mistake to, e.g., treat someone like Kepler as fundamentally a precursor to Newton. Of course, we wouldn't even bother with Kepler if what we now know as Kepler's Laws didn't end up fitting with Newtonian laws of motion; but Kepler himself obviously had no inkling of laws of motion that would be discovered in the future; rather, in creating his laws of planetary motion he was doing something that was of a piece with his trying to, for instance, relate planetary motions to musical harmonies. And Kepler comes across as a stronger, better thinker and scientist if you see how one aspect of his work connects to another rather than if you divide his work into the good stuff that we consider science because it later fits the Newtonian project versus the bad weird stuff that we've cast aside as something else. (Again, this isn't addressing your concerns here, which aren't about understanding the 1920s.)