Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...first African jungle talking picture. Mr. & Mrs. Martin Johnson have recorded pygmy dialects and drums, the yapping of wild dogs, the yawning of hippopotamuses, lions' rare roars, the whooshing of thousands of flamingo wings, the slithering of crocodiles along wet rocks, the Martin Johnsons' phonograph playing jazz. There is little pretense of danger. Audiences still shift in their seats when two tons of horny rhinoceros rush at the camera, but the statistical safety of the man or woman with the gun makes the thrill meretricious. More valid is the leisurely charm of the studies of the pygmies...
Thus in Cleveland last week began the first performance of Tom-Tom, a Negro folk opera by Shirley Graham, graduate of Howard University, postgraduate student at Oberlin. Composer Graham, 25, daughter of a Negro missionary, had keyed her music to the primitive chants, the spirituals and the modern jazz rhythms of her race. Tom-Tom's costumes, shields and tattoo marks had been designed by 19 Cleveland Negro artists. From London had come deep-voiced Jules Bledsoe, original "Ol' Man River" singer in Show Boat, to sing the part of the Voodoo Man. On a windy, cloudy night...
...course, took its Boy, Girl and Voodoo Man into a plantation scene, where a treadmill and enormous water wheel figured in the setting; then into Harlem for a lively cabaret scene. From the jungle opening, where only percussion instruments accompanied the unisonal chants, to the end, where spirituals and jazz were mingled, the tom-tom beat its insistent note. Spirited and rhythmic was the performance of the 500 Negro choristers and Negro moppets. High spots: the end of the plantation scene, with massed slaves singing the chant of their new freedom while a band plays "John Brown's Body...
Louis Armstrong, maestro of jazz, would be a good subject for one of his own songs-a black rascal raised in a waifs' home, whose first real job was playing on a Mississippi steamboat; a headliner unimpressed by contracts, with a jail sentence in his past for using drugs. Okeh, a subsidiary of Columbia Phonograph Co., knows all this. So does Victor Talking Machine but just the same they were fighting last week over Louis Armstrong. The courts in California were going to have to decide whether he was bound to go on making Okeh records for another year...
...fashion to say that Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band" started the ragtime craze; that the blues came in when William Christopher Handy took "St. Louis Blues" North; that George Gershwin took jazz into the concert rooms. No one ever accused Composer Kern of starting anything. He has simply written a great many songs of which people never seem to tire, polite, modulated tunes reflective of the musical study he put in in Germany. And he was the first to use saxophones popularly, in 1913.* Smoothly played they seemed to suit his music...