I Read a Book:Pearl Harbor Jazz: Change in Popular Music in the Early 1940s by Peter Townsend

Things are always changing, but 1942 seems especially full of portents for music since

My father always supported my writing about music, especially when he realized I could get paid for it. He never understood, though, why I disparaged music that was popular. If it was liked by people, he would say, there had to be something about it that was good. I was in my 20s, and I thought I knew better. To me, expertise in music, acquired by listening to a much wider variety than most people ever did, made it possible to realize how little sales figures reflected quality. I never had any problem writing bad things about famous musicians.

I don’t completely reject my contention now that I’m about the age my dad was when he told me that. I still think greater exposure to the vast library of musical possibility helps me to appreciate things that others might not. But I also firmly believe that everybody who hears any music is one of many blind people feeling an elephant – depending on our independently derived experiences and knowledge, we’re all going to get a different awareness of what we’re hearing. The best we can hope to do is share what each of us thinks in the belief that multiple perspectives can bring us closer to the eternally elusive Truth of any song.

Carl Wilson wrote a book on Celine Dion that I have been meaning to read for a couple decades. His exploration of popular taste has been hugely influential on music writers, and reading those writers has led me to open up my own opinion process. It is no longer acceptable to me to dismiss any record simply because it sells. I no longer believe there is a pure state of musical excellence that exists outside of individual experience. We all like what we like and we have our own good reasons for liking it.

Which brings me to this book by Peter Townsend (not the guitarist in the Who). Pearl Harbor Jazz is a close look at the musical culture of the year 1942 – the catchy title, of course, refers to the fact that 1942 was informed heavily by the event at the end of 1941 which brought the U.S. into World War II. Townsend excels at research – he pores over contemporary newspapers and magazines, as well as artist biographies and music histories to be able to state definitively where many of the nearly 600 big bands active at the time in the country were playing and how they experienced the announcement of Pearl Harbor’s bombing. He also does an exceptional job dealing with the finances, the travel, the day-to-day lives of working musicians at the time.

I wish Townsend had as much to say about country and blues (both of which are covered but not extensively) as he does about jazz and popular music. But on the other hand, jazz and popular music dominated the landscape that year to a much greater degree. And, his predominant argument, which brings a historical perspective to what Wilson and his acolytes found 20 years ago, is that the seeds of my argument with my father began to take shape when he was 17 and loving all he heard on the radio.

Most discussions of jazz history are linear, telling a story in which the music develops step by step, from New Orleans group improvisation to the origins of soloing to swing to bebop and beyond. Swing is acknowledged as being enormously popular, to the extent that for a few years, jazz was hugely commercial until a revolution occurred that changed it into a more consciously artistic form.

By focusing on one single year in America’s music world, Townsend can argue that jazz was not experienced, by either its fans or its musicians, in such a way at the time. Musicians, whether in the bands of Duke Ellington or Count Basie (revered by jazz historians) or those of Tommy Dorsey or Glenn Miller (not so beloved by same), were all out there playing the same venues, chasing the same audiences, and mixing their approaches in ways that don’t make sense from later points of view. (This is not to say there weren’t very large differences between whites and African-Americans as to their experiences; these were differences in kind rather than ambition, though.) There was no “pure” jazz. These musicians thought of themselves foremost as entertainers.

The famous after-hours jam sessions at Minton’s and other places in Harlem where the likes of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, Charlie Christian, and others created the form of be-bop, took place in 1942. Townsend refers to them, but wants to place them in a less revolutionary context. One of the primary features of be-bop is its harmonic complexity. But Townsend points out that this feature was prefigured in pop songs of the time: “In popular song of the late 1930s and the early 1940s, every possible chromatic addition to the diatonic scale had been used. . . There was now a spread of all twelve tones of the chromatic scale to be found in the harmonic and melodic structures of popular music.”

I will buy this as a starting off point, but Townsend doesn’t spend any time discussing the rhythmic changes of be-bop, nor the fact that the greater use of those twelve tones was magnified by the sheer number of times they were used, nor the fact that be-bop confused the heck out of much of the public and even a great number of older musicians who were just as comfortable with the harmonic context of popular songs as those young kids in Minton’s. Still, I’m intrigued by the idea that Parker and Christian and the others benefited from their experience in big bands playing a mix of sweet and hot material.

Meanwhile, Leonard Feather, a noted critic and later inveterate liner note writer, went to Esquire magazine with an idea to create a more “responsible” critics poll of musicians to deal with the fact that the “wrong” people kept winning readers polls at Downbeat and other publications. Here is the origin of the belief I had in the 80s when I told my dad experts had better opinions of music. Theodor Adorno was turning heads at the time with his derision of all things popular (including, Townsend points out, jazz itself – it’s always easy to pick and choose from arguments). Feather and his comperes were beginning to tease out a different view of jazz as being separate from popular music, and they went back in history to make it seem as if its practitioners never wanted it to be any other way.

Townsend says:“The conception of a distinct music called “jazz” involved an act of multiple abstraction.” This included: “(1)the separation of jazz as a narrative; (2) the isolation of certain features, such as improvisation, as atemporal essences of jazz; (3) the separation of jazz from the performance contexts in which it has subsisted; and (4) the separation of jazz from other musical forms with which it has had some connection.” We all now think of jazz as akin to classical music, an art rather than a folk or pop form. This model eventually bled into the opinions of rock critics until there was a belief that popular music, almost by definition (and usually with an unexplained exception for the 1960s) could not be artistically valid.

Pearl Harbor Jazz does much more than tease out this argument, but this does come up again and again throughout the book. I knew 1942 was an important year in music – the be-bop origin story, the beginnings of rhythm & blues, the deaths of Charlie Christian and Jimmy Blanton, the song “White Christmas,” the frustrating recording ban which began at the end of July and ran for almost two years. Townsend tells of all this and much more, and puts it in context with the specific mood and experiences of its own time. And he makes me think more of the ways received historical wisdom can be challenged. I’d say that’s a good deal on a book published back in 2006 that I only stumbled upon recently.