André Hodeir (1921–2011)

André Hodeir was a classically trained violinist and composer who first encountered jazz in the early 1940s, and went on to release a number of records of his own jazz compositions and to write several books on the subject. (His most intriguing recordings sound like a mash-up of Birth of the Cool and Esquivel). His first book, Hommes et Problémes du Jazz, was published in Paris in 1954, and in English, as Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence, in 1956. The English edition included a new chapter on the state of jazz in the aftermath of the death of Charlie Parker in 1955.

Hodeir humbly claims Descartes’ Discourse on Method as a model for his Hommes et Problémes/Evolution and Essence. Hodeir’s book is no dry treatise, though, but a sharply wry, enthusiast’s polemic. Like Descartes, he wants to suggest a new approach to understanding, and to provide a framework for appreciating a kind of music that is still developing its own aesthetic. In Hodeir’s view, the music had not been well-served by the cadre of self-styled specialists responsible for the fanciful, arbitrary dogmas that tended to recur in jazz criticism. The whole field of jazz thought needs to be revised. Everything must be subjected to doubt, reconsidered and tested by analysis; terminology should be as rigorous as possible, expressing complex ideas even at the risk of exasperating the superficial reader. Hodeir the musician/musicologist sets out to provide just such analysis, based upon his study of jazz recordings, and in the process develops a case for regarding 1950s ‘modern’ jazz as the culmination of three decades of evolution and progress.

Writing in the early 1950s, Hodeir takes direct aim at the shibboleths of the traditionalists who dismiss modern jazz as a corruption of the real thing. There never was a ‘pure’ jazz. Jazz was a blend of black American, West Indian and European elements from the beginning, so why should musicians not be allowed to continue to borrow and assimilate new elements like chromaticism and polytonality? The veneration of oldtime jazz ignores the advances made by jazz musicians since the 1920s, says Hodeir.

Fans who prefer the archaic praise records from a period of gestation, without realizing that they were applauding rough sketches that represent a valid but clumsy effort to achieve a kind of perfection that other artists attained a few years later.

Hodeir and the Hot Five
Hodeir’s commentary on Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five recordings encapsulates several of his key contentions regarding the limitations of oldtime jazz. The music of the Hot Five represents the (inadvertent) triumph of the individual personality over the group; the listener’s attention spontaneously concentrates on Armstrong, with his superior technique and sense of rhythm. Armstrong’s style is that of ‘a great innovator working within the framework of a tradition which had given him his start but which his own evolution had already rendered obsolete.’ Armstrong’s virtuosity exposes the technical and creative shortcomings of his accompanists Kid Ory and Johnny Dodds, who nonetheless represent ‘the emotive spirit of primitive jazz.’ The attempt by Kid Ory to create an expressive language on the trombone was both useful and praiseworthy, says Hodeir, but the fact remains that ‘Jimmy Harrison and Dickie Wells succeeded where this courageous New Orleans predecessor was doomed to fail.’ Wells’ outstanding playing with Count Basie (1938-1945, 1947-1950) was characterized by the seemingly contradictory qualities of symmetry (rhythmic or melodic repetition of a given motif) and contrast (‘the violent opposition of upper and lower registers, of forte and piano, of motion and repose’)—an essential combination (in Hodeir’s view) that no primitive player was able to attain. The efforts of the New Orleans pioneers to form a new language deserves respect, writes Hodeir, but aesthetically their work was a failure, and it remained for the following generation to reap the benefit of their attempts.

Oldtime to Classical to Modern
Hodeir situates the Hot Five recordings in a transitional period during which a number of individualistic styles developed out of the collective language of 1920s jazz, dividing and scattering the New Orleans school. In contrast to those who venerate the oldtime jazz, he refers to the period from 1935 to 1945 as the Classical Period. Classicism implies durability, and jazz before the 1930s was still ‘in gestation’; recorded works from before 1935 sound outdated, rudimentary. The year 1935 marks ‘the end of jazz’s growing pains,’ says Hodeir, when the music attains unprecedented material success, a new equilibrium and timelessness. In the Classical Period, jazz ceased to progress in a straight line, but its evolution had not come to an end. ‘Never before or since had so many great musicians existed side by side, uniting their efforts to found a marvelously rich and diversified school of jazz’—not only the academic playing and stereotyped riffs of Benny Goodman, but the finest work of Jimmie Lunceford, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie and Duke Ellington. And band leaders were already hinting at the direction modern jazz was taking. For Hodeir, Ellington’s “Concerto for Cootie”—in which the orchestra works in close collaboration with the soloist—represents a new kind of jazz composition, moving beyond plain improvisation to a more expressionistic conception of jazz with both the composer and the interpreter as creators. Ellington and other band leaders during the Classical Period established a different scale of values by which to judge the music, beyond what the oldtime musicians could even conceive, and ‘sound’ (sonority, tone, timbre) became an essential aspect of jazz creation.

The Modern Period in jazz (beginning at the end of World War II) has been all the richer for the persistence of the classical and oldtime schools alongside the newer Bebop and Cool tendencies, writes Hodeir. He dismisses those who classify jazz as a kind of pure, unchanging folklore, but he also denies the notion that his belief in continuous progress requires a radical rejection of the past (a charge made by ‘moldy fig’ traditionalists against supporters of modern jazz). Modern jazz is a collective creation, drawing from all the sources that came before, and any great musician is indebted to the past because he is the heir to everything his predecessors have accomplished. Bebop’s contributions to the technical and aesthetic evolution of jazz are illustrated by the works of Charlie Parker, who synthesized the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic innovations of the Classical Period. Like Armstrong before him, Parker emerged from a tradition that was too limited to contain him.

Bird cuts Mezz
Hodeir imagines a cutting contest between Parker and Mezz Mezzrow to make his point about the advance of modern jazz over oldtime jazz. On a recording of “Royal Garden Blues” overseen by the arch-reactionary Hugues Panassié in 1938, Mezzrow’s clarinet solo consists of chords broken up into arpeggios with little rhythmic variation. Parker’s recording of “Cool Blues” (1947) is an entirely different creature. Parker’s tonal approach suggest several keys simultaneously, supplementing blues harmonics with passing chords and added notes (ninths, elevenths, thirteenths). He breaks up time with short notes and irregular accents, alternately on and between beats. Mezzrow rides down a rut; Parker enlarges the jazz field.

His rhythm is complex, his sonority harsh, and his melody sometimes disconcerting, but behind the relative hermeticism Parker hides treasures of the imagination and profound sensitivity. His refusal to parade this sensitivity and his basic scorn for all obliging compliance requires us to make an effort; more than any other jazzman, he compels us to hunt for what is essential in his art.

A Scattering of Styles
Early in Evolution and Essence, Hodeir says that the aim of modern man should be to develop an attitude of receptivity, to broaden our view in order to make room for the new, not to give up what we have but to acquire and appreciate something else. The Something Else in the post-Classical era is the jumble of overlapping styles and sounds that constitute modern jazz. Hodeir realizes that the renewal of jazz by a new classicism is unlikely, since after Bebop the bird has flown (pun intended), the genie is out of the bottle, and the future is an open road. (Pick your metaphor). He encourages ecumenicalism over tribalism, pluralism over provincialism. The scattering of jazz styles is no crisis, but the consequence of a natural evolutionary process by which musicians have sought after new modes of expression. Bebop drew from classical jazz; the Cool style polished the melodic discontinuity and the rhythmic manipulations of Bebop into something more intimate. By the mid-1950s, Cool existed side-by-side with a more aggressive, rhythmically stripped-down jazz played by the likes of Clifford Brown, Horace Silver and Art Blakey. For Hodeir, the principal challenges for the future of jazz are to break up the traditional pattern of theme and variation, and to look for new structures integrating arrangement and improvisation while still allowing for the freedom of the soloist—all of which implies that the future of jazz is in the group. He favors the sound of the Gerry Mulligan groups over the Modern Jazz Quartet and Dave Brubeck, with a nod toward Lennie Tristano and his associates (Warne Marsh, Lee Konitz) as carriers of the Cool mantle (Miles Davis having run past the bounds of the style that first brought him recognition as an innovator). Hodeir has no way to know of the explosion in jazz creativity coming in the late 1950s, though he suggests that Charles Mingus and Jimmy Giuffre may have something significant to say in the years ahead. (He is right. Mingus’ subsequent work stands alone, and Guiffre’s trio with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow put the avant-garde into the Cool).

Swing, André
The ‘vertiginous’ evolution of jazz was not unique; early 20th century popular music in general—from ragtime to Tin Pan Alley—continuously enriched its language. But the sound of jazz in the early 1950s was wildly different from the sound of jazz in the early 1920s, as Hodeir points out, so how can we say that it is the same music? Are there essential, enduring elements—constant and specific—that make jazz distinctive? The question leads to the most provocative part of Hodeir’s analysis.

Those who classify jazz as a kind of pure folklore deny the obvious, says Hodeir—that jazz originated among black Americans, but has advanced far beyond its folkloric roots, absorbing and assimilating all kinds of external influences. Jazz cannot be defined by a distinctive harmonic language, having borrowed the tonal system and major and minor modes from European art music. Jazz melody likewise draws from a variety of sources; the only melodic lines unique to jazz come from the blues scale.

What made early New Orleans jazz innovative, according to Hodeir, was the way musicians handled sound. The ‘hot’ language of jazz includes vibrato, inflection (altering tone or pitch), a sharp attack, ‘distorted timbres,’ and extension of the instrument’s range into the upper registers. Together, says Hodeir, these features of the jazz sound create tension, and ‘translate with force’ certain expressive musical elements not found in European music of the time. This ‘hot’ sound Hodeir takes as one of the essential elements of jazz.

The other essential element of jazz, according to Hodeir, is the rhythmic phenomenon called swing, ‘the optimal conditions for which are both technical and psycho-physical.’ These include tempo and accentuation, equilibrium, syncopation, displaced accents, and ‘a combination of undefined forces that creates a kind of rhythmic fluidity.’ (In his critique of Ory and Dodds on the Hot Five recordings, Hodeir distills the concept of swing into terms both simple and profound: it is ‘getting the notes in the right place.’ Armstrong does, Ory and Dodds do not.)

The essential elements of jazz—the hot sound (tension) and swing (relaxation)—exist side by side, says Hodeir, but the balance between the two has shifted over time. Primitive jazz emphasized hot playing and tension, but the two-beat bar in the New Orleans-style stymied the full expression of swing.

Getting Hot is not the same thing as Swinging. —André Hodeir

During the classical period, musicians and critics, concerned more with swinging, adopted the looser, more relaxed 4/4 rhythm (hence the “Swing Era”). And just as the two-beat broke up into four, it was only logical for the four-beat to break up into the polyrhythms of modern jazz. (Bebop combined this more complex swing with the hot sound, which helps explain why Mezz Mezzrow sounds so plain when heard next to Charlie Parker). Hodeir’s point is that the oldtimers and the classicals primed the ears of musicians and listeners for the modern conception of rhythmic infrastructure, which should be heard in historical perspective, not as heresy but as the logical and necessary consequence of what came before. The steadiness of tempo—a fundamental law of jazz—persists in modern jazz, with metrical continuity provided by the bass, against which is heard the contrary rhythms of drum and piano, providing the rhythmic richness that characterizes the modern sound. (The Cool style leans away from the hot sound while maintaining the modern, complex swing, reinforcing the historical shift from ‘tension’ to ‘relaxation’).

It is noteworthy, if not downright heretical, that Hodeir does not include improvisation or the blues as essential elements of jazz, but his listening confirms for him that neither of these are ‘specific and constant’ in the music, and the logic of his analysis enables him to proffer such a bold conclusion. Descartes would probably approve.

Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence is a first-rate contribution to the jazz bibliography. Hodeir gives us a fascinating musicological discussion on the evolution of the music, an illuminating articulation of the music’s essential components, and a European’s perspective on the mid-20th c. debate between traditionalists and moderns. It is an opinionated, idiosyncratic, splendidly entertaining book.… (lisätietoja)