Roger Pryor Dodge

Roger Pryor Dodge was an aficionado of hot jazz—the early form in the New Orleans/Chicago style—but he brought a unique sensibility to his consideration of and advocacy for the music. A student of classical music and a dancer, Dodge understood right away where jazz came from and what it represented in the Western musical tradition. His article “Negro Jazz” (published in The Dancing Times in 1929, though written four years earlier) was an appreciative, insightful piece at a time when not many commentators, and few members of the public, were thinking about what jazz meant. Dodge wrote a chapter for Jazzmen (1939), on the critical reception of jazz in the 1920s and early 1930s, and continued to publish articles into the 1960s. His reviews and articles are collected in Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance (1995), and the titles of some of the essays hint at his idiosyncratic perspective: “Negro Jazz as Folk Material for Our Modern Dance,” “Jazz Critic Looks at Anthropologist,” “The Psychology of the Hot Solo,” “The Deceptive Nature of Sensuousness in Ensemble Playing,” “A Listener’s Hierarchy in Jazz: Historical Precedents for the Future.” Most of the pieces originally appeared in magazines that sprang up with the hot jazz revival of the 1930s and 40s, when the orchestrated sounds of big-band ‘swing’ music turned some commentators back toward the less-calculated, ‘frenzied’ jazz of early days, even as a younger generation of musicians went in search of newer sounds and forms. (Bebop made Dixieland sound like the soundtrack for a herky-jerky black & white film of people in funny hats running into each other and falling down).

Dodge saw jazz as part of the whole body of Western music, arriving at just the right moment to rejuvenate what had become decadent and derivative, as all art inevitably does. In polyphonic America, writes Dodge, 19th c. Negro musicians were exposed to jigs and reels, the polka and the schottische, and through their own heritage of rhythm ‘twisted’ this music into ragtime (“Negro Jazz”). Different instruments found their way into the musical palette, developing peculiar new qualities in the hands of Negro musicians. The improvisatory spirit and collective invention of black musicians extended earthy, primitive folk forms into something intricate and potently complex. For Dodge, the development from spirituals to ragtime to jazz is paralleled in the history of classical music by the evolution from street-dance accompaniment to congregational chant to the contrapuntal, rhythmic works of Bach. In “Harpsichords and Jazz Trumpets” (Hound & Horn [July-September 1934]), Dodge elaborates on the common aspects of hearing and playing classical music and jazz:

If we turn to the musical literature of the 17th and 18th centuries, we find that no two artists were supposed to play identical variations and ornaments on the same piece; on the contrary, the artist was expected extemporaneously to fill in rests, ornament whole notes, and rhythmically break up chords. The basic melody, as in jazz, was considered common property. If the player exactly imitated somebody else or faithfully followed the written compositions of another composer, he was a student, not a professional…At that time one listened first, as one does now in jazz, for the melody, then recognized the variations as such and drew intense enjoyment from the musical talent familiarly inspired. Instead of waiting months for a show piece to be composed and then interpreted (our modern academic procedure), then, in one evening, you could hear a thousand beautiful pieces, as you can now in jazz. Instead of going to a dance hall to hear Armstrong, in earlier times you might have gone to church and heard Frescobaldi; or danced all night to Haydn’s orchestra; or attended a salon and listened to Handel accompany a violinist—with his extemporaneous variations so matter of course; or sneaked in on one of Bach’s little evenings at home, when to prove his theory of the well-tempered clavier he would improvise in every key, not a stunt improvisation in the manner of someone else, but preludes and fugues probably vastly superior to his famous notated ones…

Dodge was uniquely tuned to the dance roots that jazz shares with classical music. In “A Non-Aesthetic Basis for the Dance” (Jazz Forum [September 1946]), he affirms the ‘pleasure derived from a sense of motor action and feeling of rhythm…(and) our inherent necessity for physiological release,’ emphasizing the sensuous appeal of jazz for players and dancers alike, as James Weldon Johnson did before him and Albert Murray later. In 1930, Dodge choreographed and performed a dance routine for the Billy Rose Revue, based on his transcription of solos from Duke Ellington recordings of “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” and “Black and Tan Fantasy,” and Louis Armstrong’s “Potato Head Blues.” The aptitude of accompanist Clarence Powell led Dodge to observe

…that a sympathetic reading of hot solos from notation, even on a different instrument from the original, lost nothing of the intrinsic beauty of the melodic line…spontaneous ‘hot improvisation’ need not be the sole characteristic of jazz…a good solo is always a good solo…

When Powell moved on, Dodge teamed up with trumpeter James “Bubber” Miley, who had originally played on the Ellington recordings. Miley’s solo on “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” was for Dodge the very essence of jazz expression—‘the mystery of the spontaneous folk-art creation…that baffles critics and philosophers’ (H.R.S. Society Rag [October 1941]). Dodge thought that Miley provided a model for building upon the hot jazz improvisation: once Miley had played a piece several times, he was not entirely improvising from then on; he was playing a developed version of an earlier improvisation. As a musician, Miley was able ‘to crystallize an improvisation around a kernel of inspiration, so that it is more clear and potent the next time around.’ The notation of great solos, Dodge realized, could provide the basis for expansion by the ensemble.

The future of jazz became an increasingly urgent concern for Dodge, and the hot-jazz revivalism of the 1940s brought the issue to the fore. Connoisseur record collectors sparked the revival, new periodicals sprang up to celebrate the old-time jazz, but, wrote Dodge, the enthusiasm of collectors and reviewers should not obscure ‘the present disturbing stagnation’ threatening the survival of jazz (“Hot Jazz: Notes on the Future,” HRS Society Rag [Jan/Feb 1941]). When the old-time musicians die off, jazz may as well, unless steps are taken. The ‘windbag symphonies’ of Whiteman, Gershwin and Berlin and the reliance upon popular tunes in the Swing Era had devitalized the music, but to embrace the ‘purist fallacy’ that the best jazz had been played before 1923 was to accept the present deterioration of jazz with no way forward. In an article he wrote on Duke Ellington, Dodge insisted that the art of jazz had advanced since the 1920s (“Duke Ellington,” Jazz Magazine, [January 1943]). Recording technology had improved, the best arrangers and composers—steeped in the tradition—were better at writing solos than the average jazzman was at improvising them, and the ensemble attitude of the jam session suggested new possibilities. Notations of the spontaneous emanations of the jam session were being incorporated into advanced ensemble pieces by Ellington and others, just as 16th c. dance music had evolved from simple pieces into suites and finally into extended compositions—the pattern of improvisation to notation to composition in classical music providing a model for jazz.

Dodge, like other hot jazz enthusiasts, was burdened by the tension between nostalgia and inevitable evolution. Art history taught him that change brought decay, and that the creative impulse had to be renewed from time to time. Despite his innovative dance collaborations with jazz musicians, and his attempts to outline a future for jazz, he was just a special kind of moldy fig, unwilling to acknowledge the explosion of creativity and innovation in jazz after the mid-1940s. The rise of bebop, ‘cool,’ and progressive techniques in jazz signified for Dodge a denial of the music’s melodic roots; ‘forays into harmonic scales and atonal harmonic activity, no matter how advanced, cannot counteract such manifest melodic decadence’ (“Jazz: Its Rise and Decline,” The Record Changer, [March 1955]):

…music dependent upon ingenuity alone is doomed from the start, for the ultimate significance of an invention lies in its style, not its originality…when the progressive player uses complicated chords or scalar passages foreign to the tonality of our previous jazz, such use does not necessarily imply the presence of distinguished creative activity…new effects may suggest extraordinary freedom of movement, but the pattern soon reveals itself as a repetitious identification of material…

Dodge, having contributed in the 1920s and 30s to the formulation of a new aesthetic by which jazz could be understood as serious art-music, was by the 1960s a (light-on-his-feet) stick in the mud. His written work remains valuable, though, for its intelligence and its thoughtful consideration of the mysterious appeal of music and dance. And the man danced with Bubber Miley, for crying out loud.… (meer)