Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce

by Alfred Appel

How does the jazz of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker fit into the great tradition of the modern arts between 1920 and 1950? In this text, cultural historian Alfred Appel provides the answer.

Genres: Music, Jazz, History, Nonfiction, Art

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Alfred Appel Jr. was an American professor, author and journal editor noted for his investigations into the works of Vladimir Nabokov, modern art, and jazz modernism. He edited The Annotated Lolita, an edition of Nabokov's Lolita. He also authored four other books about Nabokov, literature and music.

As a student at Cornell University, Appel took a course from Nabokov. His education was interrupted by a stint in the Army, after which he completed his undergraduate education and PhD in English Literature at Columbia University in 1963.

After teaching at Columbia for a few years, he joined the faculty of Northwestern University, where he taught until his retirement in 2000. He died of heart failure. Appel was married until his death to Nina Appel, dean of Loyola University Chicago's law school from 1983 to 2004. They had two children, Karen Oshman and television writer and producer Richard Appel.

Reviews

[Djll · Rating 3 out of 5]

A curiosity. Appel attempts, with mixed success I think, to link the discourses of a number of 20th century arts, with jazz at the center. It seems he wants to write about the things he loves as if he were a jazzman playing a solo, with repeating ideas as riffs, flights of fancy, and a few slightly jarring quotations from unexpected sources.

It's rather quaint and old-fashioned in its decidedly Modern outlook and tone -- no impenetrable academic jargon here -- and quite undisturbed in its Modern Art worldview: polyglot but decidedly Western Culture-centric. I didn't know anyone was allowed to write "serious" art criticism this way anymore. Maybe the serious critics don't think it's very serious!

Didn't finish it.

[Michael Pronko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like only a small handful of books, Appel's work connects the great movements of the early 19th century together with big leaps and unimagined connections. All too often, scholars end up in their little niches, but Appel connects the niches in insightful ways. His arguments about modernism are perhaps less the point than his way of making the brilliance of the artists he chooses come alive with new meanings. This is a work that brings in big ideas, which would otherwise be off-putting and erudite for most people, and gets into how those ideas play out in the genius of great artists. Anyone with an interest in how different artistic paths really do cross each other will find this an interesting read.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like a jazz soloist playing over the changes he'd been interpreting for decades, Appel has a blast bouncing ideas from music by Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, and Duke Ellington off of paintings and collages by the likes of Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian and writing by Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce. Written in 2002 when he was 68, the book is a celebration of what Appel calls "jazz modernism," an approach to art that collects old rags and detritus and turns it into something sublime and original. He certainly throws a lot of ideas at the reader, and some of them stick.

He doesn't seem at all interested in postmodernism, and hints at a distaste for many ideas that came along after he was in his thirties. Feminism and Afrocentrism and deconstruction of texts are all dismissed with slight asides. But if you can get past discomforts with these small passages, there is no question that he is an exciting writer on the music, art, and writing he loves and knows intimately. Music is covered with the most depth, and I found his take on these old records to be as exciting as the music can be. He writes with all the careful construction of the musicians, and the feeling of freedom and emotional truth hits hard throughout.

Also, I wonder how many times he told the anecdote he puts in here about the night he was sitting at a table watching Charlie Parker play in 1951 when Igor Stravinsky came and sat at the next table over. If that had happened to me, I think I'd be spinning the tale every time I met anybody new for the rest of my life.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Especially knowledgeable about classic jazz: Armstrong, Parker, Ellington, Waller and the struggles of black artists as second-class citizens in the first half of the twentieth century.

[Doug Reed · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was a bit disappointed by this book. For whatever reason, I expected more.