- the state or quality of being modern.
Here we will be looking at modernity, in direct relation to Jazz.
"Approaching the topic of jazz and modernism, one
might begin with the emergence of bebop, which was
routinely called “modernist” in the
1940s. While the debate about bop replicated
aspects of earlier disputes about literary and
artistic modernism, the parochial nature of the
debate (largely confined to fans, journalists,
and record collectors) insulates it from the more
compelling issues associated with modernism. An
alternative approach to the topic might enumerate
encounters with, and opinions about, jazz by
recognized modernists. Ezra Pound, for instance,
backed George Antheil's concert hall amalgamation
of jazz with futurism, even as he disparaged the
piano as an agent of jazz (confusing it with
ragtime). But most of the modernists had little
interest in jazz, and to detect fugitive traces of
their encounter with it one would have to scrape
deep recesses of the biographical barrel (and, in
most cases, the evidence would illustrate a larger
pattern of Negrophilia or Negrophobia, adding
little to the study of jazz). A third approach,
adopted here, is to regard jazz as a conspicuous
feature of modernity as it was manifested during
and after the Great War. In that capacity,
jazz unquestionably informed modernism as
intellectual challenge, sensory provocation, and
social texture."
- Jed Rasula, 2012.
Modernity as a Cultural Style - Jazz in Black and White.
American Modernism
Due to it's American origins this resource shows some interesting links between modernity, jazz and how they stood for similar values.
The American writer Lawrence W Levine described Jazz as "a catalyst of shifting national consciousness". It shows how times were changing in the states due to the influence of modernity and it's views.
Jazz itself owes it roots to black slave culture primarily but is a melting pot of different cultures. It was a positive new genre for the modern age and a direct product of modernity and modernism. At the time it was the progressive musical brother to the artistic revelations seen in painting, sculpture, design, fashion and architecture. An overall creative blanket, fresh and vibrant.
Daniel Gregory Mason charged that jazz "is so perfectly adapted to
robots that the one could be deduced from the other. Jazz is thus the
exact musical reflection of modernist industrial capitalism".
Irving Berlin called jazz the "music of the machine age." Players drew influences from everyday street talk in Harlem, as well as from French Impressionist paintings.
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