LOST CHORDS:
White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945
By Richard M. Sudhalter
Oxford University Press, 890 pages, $35
Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz” is a curious book in that it seems in some ways to be willfully defeating its own purpose. It is surely one of the longest treatises written about jazz, rivaling in size Gunther Schuller’s “Early Jazz” and “The Swing Era.” (Richard Sudhalter, known as the biographer of Bix Beiderbecke, arguably the most revered of all white jazz musicians and certainly the most mythologized, promises in his preface a second volume to “Lost Chords” that, presumably, will take us up to the present.) A reader is immediately brought up short wondering if the subject–the careers of various white jazz musicians over a mere 30-year span, from the beginning of World War I to the end of World War II–is worth this level of scrutiny.
This is not to suggest that the musicians selected for study in this book are unimportant. Many, like Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Red Nichols, Red Norvo and Bud Freeman, for instance, clearly are of considerable significance in the history of American popular dance music. Nor am I suggesting that the consideration of “whiteness” as a sociological category and phenomenon is not potentially valuable in an art form that has been as racially defined and, sometimes, as racially polarized as jazz has been. But I fear that the length of the book may be a sign of the author’s desperation–more than his determination–to inflate the worth of his subject beyond even the endurance of a most-learned reader.
The length of the book, which will drastically reduce the number of people who will read it, seems a particular disservice, as the author is on such a revisionist mission. What is the point of presenting a challenge to orthodoxy in a way that compromises its ability to affect popular thinking? (Although I am reminded that Martin Bernal’s extremely difficult two-volume revisionist work, “Black Athena,” on a far more esoteric subject than Sudhalter’s, has had a stunning impact on certain segments of the populace.)
Whatever the case, Sudhalter’s revisionism is of some moment. As he asks in his introduction: “Why, then, a book on white musicians? Doesn’t that focus also imply fragmentation, working against inclusiveness or three-dimensionality?” He had in the previous paragraphs accused those writers who have insisted that jazz is primarily or even exclusively a black or African-American music that whites could never play authentically, or that they simply copied and stole, of precisely that: fragmentation and divisiveness. “The story of jazz,” Sudhalter writes, is one of “cooperation, mutual admiration, cross-fertilization; comings-together and driftings-apart” among blacks and whites.
Not surprisingly, the view of jazz as a black music stolen by less creative white musicians in one formulation or another is strenuously asserted by several black authorities on jazz. (A number of whites have argued a similar line.) White critic Terry Teachout has been in a debate with Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch and Wynton Marsalis, all black, about the presentations for “Jazz at the Lincoln Center” on precisely this point. I think this view represents a synecdoche for blacks in that they see their encounters with whites as being defined by theft: slavery was a theft of labor; Afrocentrists believe that whites have stolen black history, particularly the legacy of ancient Egypt; black nationalists believe that whites stole Africa during the days of colonialism; African-Americans believe their original languages, religions and cultural beliefs were taken from them by whites; and it has been commonly believed among many blacks that whites have stolen black music, from the 19th Century days of minstrelsy and the emergence of the spirituals to the rap and hip-hop of our own day.
The pervasiveness of this belief among many jazz writers, and especially black jazz writers, means Sudhalter’s attempt to redefine jazz as an American music equally shaped by blacks and whites, with influences going both ways across the color line (reasonable assertions, to be sure), will be met with sharp criticism, possibly even hostility. Some will be insulted by the subject of the book, immediately seeing it as racist. (It is difficult, in most scholarly circles, to write about American whites as whites these days unless one is being very critical of them.) I hope Sudhalter’s book is not dismissed through either invective or polemic but is seriously engaged, for it is a valuable work, even if some may disagree with the author’s protestation for the book’s necessity as a corrective. A man who has worked as hard as Sudhalter to produce first-rate scholarship needs to be taken seriously.
There is much extraordinary information in “Lost Chords,” certainly the most comprehensive book on white jazz ever written, with lines of connection and influence and interaction that are exhausting in their minuteness. (Sudhalter is not a prose stylist of any distinction, although the work exhibits great intellectual energy.) What hurts the volume is its sometimes excessive detailing and Sudhalter’s refusal to point his book to a particular audience: either a general audience of non-musicians or a smaller audience of musicologists who can profitably read bars of music. It is neither a fully satisfying social history nor a fully realized musicological study–though it tries to be both–which finally makes it cumbersome, stilted and ill-at-ease with itself. Nonetheless, for the jazz historian and students of American popular culture, this book is of some consequence.
