SHINING TRUMPETS,
SHINING TRUM[ETS, by Rudi Blesh '21.Alfred A. Knopf, 1946, 365 pp., $5.00.
One o£ the most prominent characteristics of our civilization is its literacy. We seem to be both blessed and cursed in having everything and anything set down accurately in black and white. Blessed because obviously our technical progress and much of our cultural enjoyment would be impossible without the printed word, but also cursed because the spontaneity which is the very source of life is in danger of being buried under rather elaborate prescriptions. Certainly, in our concert halls improvisation is encountered only very rarely, and the hit-parades, as well, as other sources of "plugging" have only succeeded in stamping, typing and petrifying the living, improvisational practice of real jazz into a sweet and commercialized hybrid badly lacking in spontaneity, both social and musical. Rudi Blesh, whose discerning comments on jazz appear weekly in the New York Herald Tribune, has now given us a history of jazz that is neither precious nor vulgar, neither uncritical nor hostile. His volume is the product of a labor of love, yet he brings all the resources of a keenly critical mind to bear on his problem. His phonograph list shows that no advertising hullabaloo will make him accept big names (including Duke Ellington) for the real stuff. His attitude toward the American negro, the prime creator of jazz, is free from condescension and infatuation: Blesh simply reveals the link between the African and the New Orleans tradition. At the same time he gives due weight to rec ent research revealing the influence of AngloSaxon hymns on spirituals and blues. And speaking of the blues, no better exposition of their improvisational nature, their melodic and harmonic characteristics could be imagined than the two good-sized chapters devoted to the subject. The 24 pages of musical examples are excellently chosen. Together with Blesh's own recordings (listed in the appendix) they complement one of the most searching analyses of a musical style that is affecting high and low-brows all over the world.
