Jazz

[Justin Schwartz]

No, Uday's friend is quite right. If you listen to pop vocals, in fact, jazz 
vocals of the jazz age and early swing, it is very mannered stuff; Armstrong 
sounds modern. Bing Crosby learned from Louis how to do it--he was quite 
explicit about this--and taugfht the white pop singers. Will Friedwald's 
book on Jazz Vocals is good on this. --jks


>
>On Thu, 18 Jan 2001, Uday Mohan wrote:
>
> > A friend makes the case for Armstrong by claiming that he changed the
> > rhetorical style not only of jazz, but of popular culture in general, by
> > introducing an informal, conversational mode of address. And that this
> > helped shift popular culture away from a mannered, formal style.
>
>Your friend has us confused with Europe.  The informal, conversational
>mode of address was originally our only rhetorical style, and it never
>died out in popular culture.  Instead what happened was that high culture,
>which for the first century of our existence was associated with treason,
>had to be painstakingly built on top of it out of nothing and against
>resistance.  For a delightful book laying out in detail how this process
>occurred in classical music, museum-going and Shakespeare, see Lawrence
>Levine's _Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in
>America_.  It has many very funny bits and is written without a trace of
>jargon.
>
>Michael
>
>__________________________________________________________________________
>Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com
>
>

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