Fox-trot in the USSR
Jazz in the Soviet Union during the 1920s was an explosion on the proletarian ear. Groups like Benny Payton’s Jazz Kings and Charles Wooding’s Chocolate Kiddies captivated audiences and had the whole country dancing. Frederick Starr writes in “Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union”, that “by 1926 the desire to revert to the pre-revolutionary fashions in popular culture were dead.” While the country was still playing the Party’s Civil War songs and tired hits from light opera, one only needed look at the sheet music publications to understand what the public really wanted. Matvei Blanter’s “John Gray,” “Areo-Foxtrot,” “I and Billy,”, or “Electric Dances,”; M. Nikolaevsky’s “Miss Evelyn Foxtrot,”; Lev Drizo’s “Yes! We Killed The Bottle,”; “The Hypnosis Tango,”; and Yuri Miliutin’s fox-trot “Harry and Barry” was just some of the music rushing the shops. When compositions weren’t available, people wrote their own. While Wooding would try to appeal to more symphonic appetites for arrangements, the Payton septet would hypnotize audiences of Moscow with their New Orleanian style that “essentially killed the possibility of pretentious symphonic jazz and insured spontaneity.”
Jazz music exposed an important part of the connections that take hold to our sonic expression. While governing bodies may seek public order, composers try to capture genre, and populaces embrace uplifting ideals, sounds that profoundly move us are historically free of these categorical ideals. Kurt Weill, the German composer and collaborator on such works as “The Threepenny Opera” and “Mack the Knife” comments, “Unlike art music, dance music does not reflect towering personalities standing above time, but rather the instincts of the masses. And a glance into the dance halls of all continents demonstrates that jazz is just as precisely the outward expression of our time as the waltz was of the outgoing 19th century.” What is true of the early Soviet music culture was, that devoid of state direction, the people gave their vote as to what they defined their generation by, and it wasn’t the march of nationality war propaganda.
Two important similes that tie back into some of the previous discussions I’ve noted of world music is the connection to notation and expressiveness. Just as in Native American and West African compositions rely on passing repertoire from generation to generation without the use of written forms, jazz music and its improvisational style relies on the expressive nature of musician’s individual performance rather than the intent of the original composers voice. Arabic music experiences this same phenomenon, and the scholars of Arabic music debate regularly on the effects of western notation to the authenticity of performing. As with jazz, The Wooding group’s largest criticisms came from his insistence on a symphonic approach to the style. In his mind, he was trying to present a loftier demonstration of jazz to preserve his prestige. Wooding spoke regularly of jazz being a means of survival until he could obtain higher aims. What happened would be the exact opposite. Jazz music’s appeal was its embrace of individuality, personal expression, and mixture of cultural influences. Payton’s Jazz Kings would remain for high success two years longer than Wooding’s group as a testament to how the music’s connections to our deeper senses take hold.
Dmitri Shostakovich’s close friend and Leningrad conductor Nikolai Malko would comment on the ensemble as a whole that, “It is not the content but the performance of their music that counts. The players actually play rather than triumph over difficulties.” Shostakovich himself was also a fan of the music. Even he arranged Vincent Youmans’s “Tea for Two” as a fox-trot for symphonic orchestra called “Tahiti trot.” From 1924 to 1929, the early Soviet Union enjoyed an explosion of dance music that got the population back on its feet. Other idioms persisted, and the state continued to scramble to organize, but jazz transcended the chaos and brought much of the young country together. The racial dynamics of this period would bear its head as the criticism from national treasures would come forth and condemn jazz for its connections to Negro culture, but for a time, it was the talk of the town. I’ll dive into the ugly downfall of jazz and the rise of state institutions tomorrow, but for now, let’s swing to the music of the Alexander Tsfasman Dance Orchestra playing Joseph, Joseph. Thanks for reading, and check out the posts from earlier this week to catch up on early Soviet music.