Jazz and Jews feature — Cadence magazine, July-Sept 2024
Mike Gerber © 2024
Jazz writer Martin Williams, in conversation with Charlie Parker’s one-time producer Ross Russell, disclosed something tantalisingly inconclusive; he said: “I think it was a sociologist who did some kind of tabulation about the ethnic and national backgrounds of jazz musicians. Of course Negroes were first. And I think next were Jews, next Italians … After that, things came down to such a scarcity that it didn’t mean much, as I remember.”
Whether Jews really have produced, after African Americans, more jazz musicians than other minorities I’m aware have figured prominently, I would hesitate to say.
As Dan Morgenstern however told me, before he retired as director of the Institute of Jazz Studies, and as cited in my new book, Kosher Jammers: “Jazz reflects the idea of America as a melting pot because minorities made such an enormous contribution to this music, it comes out of the encounter between the African and the European – that’s a kind of shorthand, it’s over-simplified, but what does that European influence mean? It means Irish, Jewish, Italian, Spanish. And if you look at American jazz musicians, minorities really play a dominant role.”
Jews and black Americans were precluded from entry to certain professions until well into the twentieth century, so many found advancement in entertainment, including popular music, the Jews as entrepreneurs as well as musicians.
Dr Bruce Raeburn has shown that New Orleans Jewish musicians were involved in jazz in its embryonic stage, and the Jewish presence became more pronounced when the music gravitated to Chicago and New York. But they were not yet nearly numerous enough to warrant an assumption rapidly formulating in the public mind, and propounded by cultural commentators, that jazz and Jews were somehow intimately connected.
One point of confusion was the 1924 premiere of Rhapsody in Blue that the commissioning bandleader Paul Whiteman hyped as “making a lady out of jazz”. George Gershwin, its Jewish composer, made no such claim as far as I’m aware; he was upfront about his adoration of jazz, blues and other black music forms that, peppered with a touch of Jewish, inspired Rhapsody, his other classical works, and his popular songs.
Another epochal event was the 1927 first talkie movie The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, America’s most popular singer-entertainer of the era. It is a saga about Jewish assimilation in Jazz Age America in which jazz, as imperfectly understood, is the medium through which the Jolson character transcends the shtetl mentality of his fictional cantor father. Few today would mistake Jolson, whose actual father was a cantor, for a genuine jazz singer, but the movie consolidated the conviction that Jews were responsible for the popularisation of black music.
Blacks, Jews, and an establishment-defying new genre – a combination guaranteed to spook the bigots, among them motoring mogul Henry Ford, as ranted in his article ‘Jewish Jazz – Moron Music – Becomes our National Music’.
It was published in 1921 when urban American popular music was fast mutating, becoming blacker in inspiration, also more than a touch Jewish as Jewish songwriters were so heavily involved.
Most “Great American Songbook” tunes, so called, were composed between about 1910, when jazz was germinating out of an earlier syncopated form, ragtime, and the mid-fifties, when rock erupted on the scene. And the best songbook tunes, although rarely written with jazz in mind, have attained the status of jazz standards, beloved by generations of jazz musicians, whether adhering close to the melody, improvising mainly on the harmonies, or constructing their own melodic line over the chord changes.
In Kosher Jammers, I’ve dedicated an extensive chapter to consideration of whether songbook standards can be said to have contributed to the way jazz evolved. My reason for doing so was because Jewish songwriters were so prolific that they even influenced non-Jewish peers such as Cole Porter.
I referenced the Jazz Standards website, which lists the top thousand most recorded standards, and discovered that six of the top ten standards were composed by Jewish songwriters – headed by Johnny Green’s ‘Body and Soul’ – nearly half the top hundred were, and around a third of the top thousand.
Among those I contacted was Gunther Schuller, whose Jazz: Its Roots and Early Development and The Swing Era are musicological studies of the way jazz progressed before bebop. As nowhere in them is there any indication that the songbook might have played some part in that evolution, I asked him if that contribution had been underestimated.
Schuller agreed: “I think the great American songwriters contributed enormously, although, as you say, inadvertently to developments in jazz. Not so much in its sound, but in its harmonic and structural developments beyond and away from primarily the blues and simplistic early New Orleans and ragtime standards.” These songs, Schuller added, “forced improvising jazz musicians to expand their ears to wider ranging harmonic, more modulating progressions, and in turn expanded their creative horizons”.
By the mid-1930s, when jazz went mainstream with the popularity of big swing bands, it was Jewish clarinettist Benny Goodman who led the charge thanks to his band’s exposure on coast-to-coast American radio. It is to Goodman’s credit therefore that, with his patrician mentor John Hammond’s encouragement, he determined that the centrality of the African American in the development of jazz should be publicly recognised. Goodman, who’d grown up in poverty in Chicago, risked his success, during the acute economic depression, to hire black artists, engaging Fletcher Henderson to create arrangements for his big band, while in his small satellite combos, African American artists were given starring roles.
When Goodman announced plans to include pianist Teddy Wilson and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton on a tour down south, DownBeat magazine predicted a race riot. In the event, audiences swallowed their prejudices and acclaimed the artists.
Morgenstern has pointed up how significant was Goodman’s racial breakthrough, jazz the first publicly integrated sector of American life a decade before Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers baseball team.
Jewish clarinettist Artie Shaw, Goodman’s contemporary, went even further by integrating black musicians into his big band, with vocalist Billie Holiday out front. “I just hired them because I wanted them in the band. Hot Lips Page, Billie Holiday – they sounded good,” Shaw told me.
Nonetheless, I contend that it’s no coincidence that Shaw and Goodman did what they did. Or that Abel Meeropol wrote Billie Holiday’s most famous song, the anti-lynching classic ‘Strange Fruit’, or that the first recording of it was for Milt Gabler’s Commodore, America’s first specialist jazz label, or that Holiday introduced it at Café Society, an integrationist New York jazz club founded by Barney Josephson. Like Shaw and Goodman, Meeropol, Gabler and Josephson were Jewish.
So Jews engaged in jazz were at the forefront of efforts to ensure proper recognition for the black artists they idolised. The broader historical context is that, despite inevitable tensions, Jews and their black compatriots were often closely allied in the struggle to bring social justice to the United States. One of my interviewees was black critic Stanley Crouch, whose reflections on African Americans and Jews in American culture and society I found fascinating and illuminating.
Jews, Gabler and Josephson among them, can moreover be counted among the most significant facilitators in jazz history. Some others include: Irving Mills – Duke Ellington’s personal manager from 1926 to around 1940, the years during which Ellington forged his international reputation; Joe Glaser – in my book I mainly look at him through his relationship with Louis Armstrong; Alfred Lion and his partner Francis Wolff at Blue Note, the most iconic of all jazz record labels; Orrin Keepnews, co-founder of the Riverside and Milestone labels; Contemporary Records founder Lester Koenig on the west coast; Max Gordon, who owned the Village Vanguard jazz club, and his wife Lorraine who took over when he died; impresario Norman Granz, who was outspoken against any second-class treatment directed at the black artists he engaged. And jazz festival pioneer George Wein, acknowledged by Stanley Crouch as having “promoted more jazz concerts here and abroad and paid the salaries of more jazz artists than anyone in the history of the music”.
Most Jewish American jazz musicians have not sought to express their Jewishness in their music – not overtly anyway. Saxophonist Stan Getz said he always sought to sound black, but that it came out sounding Jewish. Several others have spoken in similar terms.
As for intentional attempts to mesh jazz with Jewish, Yiddish jazz gained fleeting prominence in 1938 when Benny Goodman’s band, with Jewish trumpeter Ziggy Elman featuring a klezmer solo, performed ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen’ at Carnegie Hall. The song, adapted from a New York Jewish musical, became a jazz standard. In recent decades, there has been a proliferation of Jewish-themed jazz – jazz fused not only with klezmer, but also with liturgical music, with music from the Judeo-Hispanic Ladino tradition, and with Jewish music that originated in the middle east and north Africa. And the radical Jewish music composed and curated by John Zorn, much of it jazz related, has become widely appreciated beyond just the Jewish community.
Kosher Jammers: Jewish connections in jazz -- Volume 1 the USA, by Mike Gerber (Vinyl Vanguard, 2024). Paperback ISBN 9798224744800 (406 pages); ePub ISBN 9798223775706.
Porgy and Bess feature — Jewish Socialist winter 2009 edition
From Charleston to Soweto
Mike Gerber looks at the background to George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess after watching Cape Town Opera’s production
Recession time, and the living ain’t easy. So it was great to take time off from the global downturn and succumb to the seductive strains of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, as performed in an adaptation by Cape Town Opera (CTO) at London’s Royal Festival Hall.
My adoration of Gershwin’s music goes back to my childhood and the 78rpm disc we had of his “symphonic jazz” composition, Rhapsody in Blue. Gershwin, a Jazz Age American Jew, is equally famous for his Broadway show songs that have inspired countless jazz musicians.
But Porgy, composed as a “folk-opera” for an all-Black company of singers at its 1935 Broadway premiere (following a try-out in Boston), is perhaps the finest representation of his art.
While the Gershwin original was based on a novel by white writer DuBose Heyward about a Black fishing community in Charleston, South Carolina, in America’s deep south, CTO transposed the storyline to the awful realities of apartheid South Africa.
Before I come to the CTO show, some reflections on the racial controversy that has dogged Porgy as originally conceived. Like Blue Monday, Gershwin’s youthful attempt at a black-themed opera for George White’s “girlie” revue The Scandals of 1922 – Porgy is set in the “black side of town”; in Blue Monday’s case Harlem, a district Gershwin frequented in his native New York. There are certain similarities of plot: both deal with the seamier side of life and a heroine – Vi in Blue Monday; Bess in Porgy – embroiled in a love triangle.
However, whereas Blue Monday was written to be performed in blackface, Gershwin resisted overtures from Al Jolson to play Porgy. Jolson had popularised Gershwin’s “Swanee” early in the composer’s career, but when DuBose Heyward suggested Jolson for Porgy, Gershwin reportedly replied: “The sort of thing that I should have in mind for Porgy is a much more serious thing than Jolson could ever do.
Instead Gershwin stuck out for black performers in all the key roles and chorus. Musically, Porgy is far superior to Blue Monday. There were echoes from the earlier work, but in the decade and a half between the two projects, Gershwin continuously strove to develop his innate gifts, taking tuition from masters in orchestration. Porgy engaged him in the most intensive endeavour of his career. He removed himself to Folly Beach, near Charleston, to closely observe the lives, mores and music of the black fishing community on which he would base the work. Nearly two years were spent composing and orchestrating Porgy, while Heyward worked up the dialogue and collaborated with Gershwin’s brother Ira on lyrics. Performers were selected, including Ann Brown as Bess and Todd Duncan as Porgy. Duncan was invited to Gershwin’s Manhattan studio to hear the brothers, George at the piano, sing the incomplete score. Though, as recounted in Joan Peyser’s George Gershwin biography, Duncan was “appalled” by their voices, he recalled: “I was in heaven. Those beautiful melodies in this new idiom – it was something I had never heard before.”
That was the Gershwin magic, alchemising the influences of folk and worksong, spirituals, street cries, jazz, blues and opera. What emerges from this creative cauldron is not some “world music” mish-mash but pure Gershwin gold, songs and orchestration unmistakably impressed with his personality and – I do not use the word lightly – genius.
Jewish music seeped into the mix too. Film composer Bernard Herrmann recalled Gershwin telling him about “Summertime”, the opening song in Porgy: “People may think it sounds too Yiddish.” Normally, that wouldn’t have been a problem for Gershwin; he was a habitué of the Yiddish musical theatre and his Jewish heritage infused much of his oeuvre. Before Porgy, he had even begun working towards a Jewish-themed opera, The Dybukk. Isaac Goldberg, Gershwin’s first biographer, revealed in a 1936 edition of B’nai B’rith Magazine that he had heard Gershwin playing snatches of that score and said: “It would be a pity, from an artistic as well as psychological standpoint, if Gershwin, during his experiments with Negro-American and native American material, did not find a libretto of Jewish atmosphere for the exercise of his expanding gifts.”
One can only grieve that Gershwin did not live long enough to produce such a work, or indeed any further work; he was only in his late 30s when he died from a brain tumour in 1937 and surely hadn’t peaked creatively. But Porgy was an awesome way to cap his career.
What, though, of the racial controversy? Todd Duncan, the first Porgy, asserted shortly before he died in 1998: “This business about Porgy and Bess demeaning the Negro race is all poppycock. Gershwin wanted authenticity.” Gershwin was satisfied that Porgy “deals with Negro life in America, it brings to the operatic form elements that have never before appeared in opera … the humor, the superstition, the religious fervor and the irrepressible high spirits of the race”.
Many blacks, though, were offended. Duke Ellington, Gershwin’s contemporary, thought the music “grand” but decried Porgy’s “lampblack negroisms”. In truth, if the reader will forgive me, it is not so black and white. Musicologist John Andrew Johnson, in an essay about Blue Monday and its relation to Porgy, noted that Blue Monday “was a long way from minstrelsy - it was fundamentally flawed as a serious work about blacks, perpetuating black stereotypes while simultaneously stepping away from suchstereotype and grappling with serious, universal emotions – flawed, too, like many would say of Porgy and Bess, because it presents degrading (and many would say racially derogatory) situations without providing social commentary, a pre-requisite for what Duke Ellington termed an ‘honest negro musical play’ .”
James Weldon Johnson however, a leading black literary figure in the Harlem Renaissance, praised Porgy for employing more than 60 black performers and said that in Porgy “the Negro removed all doubts about his ability to do acting that requires thoughtful interpretation and intelligent skill”, while as a play it “loomed high above every Negro drama that has ever been produced”. Johnson’s composer brother, J Rosamond Johnson, also defended the work.
White composer Virgil Thomson, whose own black-cast opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, premiered a year earlier, castigated Porgy. Thomson, an establishment scion, wrote in Modern Music: “Gershwin has not and never did have any power of sustained musical development. The material is straight from the melting pot – I do not like fake folklore, nor fidgety accompaniments, nor bittersweet harmony, nor six-part choruses, nor gefilte fish orchestration.”
A fishy whiff, here, of antisemitism and WASP snobbishness. As I have written in my book, Jazz Jews: “Gershwin’s detractors from the privileged classical realm were, I warrant, jealous that he, a Jewish first-generation product of multi-ethnic New York and Tin Pan Alley so effortlessly out-trumped them.”
Debate about the portrayal of blacks in Porgy will continue, but Gershwin’s opera will live on because the music is peerless. Black soprano Grace Bumbry, born the year Gershwin died, who performed as Bess in the New York Metropolitan Opera’s 1985 production, put Porgy in perspective: “We had come too far to have to retrogress to 1935. My way of dealing with it was to see that it was really a piece of Americana, of American history, whether we liked it or not. Whether I sing it or not, it was still going to be there.” Yes, it’ s still going to be there, like the Merchant of Venice with its antisemitic characterisation of Shylock, for modern companies to reinterpret along progressive lines, should they so choose.
Which brings us to the Cape Town Opera Porgy. When an all-white group in apartheid South Africa requested permission to stage Porgy and Bess, Ira Gershwin refused. It should only ever be performed in its entirety with blacks in the lead roles, he insisted, and inscribed this in his will. South Africa outlived apartheid, and in Cape Town Opera’ s UK tour, black performers predominated, both as soloists and chorus.
The production transposed the action inland to a hijacked building in Soweto, where police slaughtered black anti-apartheid protestors in the 1960 Sharpesville massacre. Other than that, CTO deviated little from the original story. centring on Bess’s vacillating relations with boyfriend Crown, crippled beggar Porgy and pusher Sportin’ Life, in a plot that involves gambling and murder.
Porgy as adapted by CTO opens a window on the horrors of the past, but at the Royal Festival Hall in London it felt like a celebration of the new South Africa, 15 years into its existence.
Thankfully, CTO staged the entire opera – some 2 hours 45 minutes – so one could fully savour not only Gershwin’s delectable songs but also all the underlying jazzy/bluesy harmonic twists of instrumental passages, choruses and solos. American conductor, David Charles Abell, interpreted the score thrillingly. The instrumentalists were not consigned to the customary orchestra pit, but were on stage in front of the cast.
This might account for my one quibble in an otherwise wonderful evening: although I enjoyed the voices of the cast and the joyous conviction with which they performed, it was a struggle at times to pick out their words. A pity because, as CTO artistic director Christine Crouse confirmed to me, “We have changed some of the lyrics.” She is white, as is CTO’s general manager Michael Williams, so the company, which celebrated its 10th birthday in May 2009, is hopefully emblematic of post-apartheid South Africa.
As a non-profit venture, CTO has survived without subsidy from South Africa’s government. Crouse would not comment on this, but CTO gets by on donations, lottery money and the patronage of a loyal audience. The UK tour of Porgy, which also included Cardiff and Edinburgh, was made possible through support from the philanthropic foundation established by South African-born Jew Sir Donald Gordon.
“Nobody has seen this production in South Africa,” said Crouse. There was, she said, virtually no black audience for opera in the apartheid years. “It has improved, but we have by no means succeeded to fully integrate our audiences.”
How much, I asked her, does the South Africanised Porgy chime with cast members’ own experience? “The cast loved it because they felt that they owned the story. The brutality was often a reflection on the apartheid years and what some ofthem really experienced. Some of our people live in areas where death, poverty and violence are still very much part of society. But there is also lots of laughter, happiness and music, singing and dance.”
Few CTO singers have had formal opera training, and there is hardly an abundance of black-themed operatic works. So what is the prospect of new operas being commissioned for CTO which integrate the music of black South Africa, such as kwela and township jazz?
“Cape Town Opera has a tradition of creating new works, some which have been exclusively written for black singers,” says Crouse.“Michael Williams is writing a piece called Mandela’s African Songbook, which will include kwela and township jazz. We have also a jazz indigenous opera called Love and Green Onions, which was written for the company. We are continually looking for new works that will be suited to the strengths of our company.”
There is no doubt, however, that Porgy has profoundly touched the black cast members. “When I sing Porgy I feel everything inside me. It touches me a lot,” affirmed Xolela Sixaba.
Ntobeko Rwanqa, who doubled as Porgy and Crown, said: “Porgy and Bess is not about race, colour or creed – it’s about being human. For this opera, and its music, it doesn’t matter if you’re white, black or yellow. Anybody can relate to Porgy and Bess. “Fear of the police still runs deep,” he added. “In the ’70s they kicked you like anything, they beat you like anything. I remember how police picked up and planted drugs on my father, a church minister. They would mess everything up.”
Pretty Yende, who played Clara, concurred that the scars of racism are still here. “You can still see how white people treat black people. But I also think we are really living in a time of possibilities. During apartheid there were so many things black people couldn’t do, but I am of a generation which can – there are many possibilities for us now.”
Mike Gerber © 2009
