Paul Whiteman was a formidable figure in jazz/popular music history. The facts of Whiteman’s career have been well covered by The Syncopated Times. His place in jazz history is complex. Whiteman was classically trained but liked jazz, associating it closely with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and other white purveyors of the music. He hired jazz musicians for his orchestras and arrangers who infused jazz elements into much of his music. But he complicated his legacy by saying he wanted “make a lady of jazz,” and accepting the title “King of Jazz.” This is why, to many jazz historians, he became a lightning rod for “appropriation” and even racism.
There are eight essays and an Afterword in Beyond the Bandstand that attempt to place Whiteman in a broader mid-20th century socio-cultural context. Some stretch a point too thin, but some present useful, interesting facts and ideas.
The first essay, Black Music, White Bodies, Paul Whiteman’s Body, is the most speculative, discussing how Whiteman’s large girth mapped onto race in the 1920s-’30s. Author Stephanie Doktor talks about the fad for dieting and the importance of Eugenics. She says that sex was mapped onto race and Whiteman’s weight worked to de-sexualize him when mixing of the races was dangerous. In comparison, Doktor writes, Ma Rainey’s large body was hypersexualized. Doktor seems to want it both ways—that Whiteman’s fatness made jazz a “sexualized music”—more palatable to a white audience, but also that fatness and blackness were equated.
She talks about the famous “King of Jazz” cartoon, where Whiteman goes to Africa to bring back jazz. This is her interpretation: “The labor required to ‘become the King of Jazz,’ had consequences that misshaped his body, made palpable by the bump on his head [delivered by Africans]. Put differently, he made a racial sacrifice that deformed his physical integrity.” Make of this what you will. I will note that the author traces the etymology of the word jazz to sex, which has been proven to be false. It was initially used in a sports context and meant “pep” or energy. [Elijah Wald responds to this by writing: “the origins of the word ‘jazz’ are murky, but the claim that the word meant sex—made by, among others, Sidney Bechet and Eubie Blake, has by no means been disproved.”]
The next essay is Paul Whiteman, Cultural Ownership, and Jazz Historiography in Dave Peyton’s “The Musical Bunch.” Dave Peyton was the important black music critic writing for the Chicago Defender. This essay examines how he viewed Whiteman’s music. Peyton’s views were complex and sometimes contradictory. He admired Whiteman and other white bands, especially their precision and business acumen. However, he believed black musicians had the inside track on the music and could become pre-eminent through hard work.
The author, Christy Jay Wells tries to compare Peyton’s work to that of current jazz historians. Both, Wells says, are “threading the needle between increasing Whiteman’s importance by even discussing him and saying his importance has been under-valued.”
I found the next essay, Paul Whiteman and Modern Metropolitan Music, 1927–40, by John Howland to be fascinating. Modern Metropolitan Music (MMM) refers to dance band arrangements, concert works and jazzed classics—“show biz cosmopolitanism for the common folk”—variety entertainment, elaborate production numbers. The “high” culture mixed with the “low.”
Howland shows how “Rhapsody in Blue” and like compositions, commissioned by Whiteman and played by his orchestras, moved from his 1924 “Experiment in Modern Music” to “pops” middle brow. It was a style that became much used in film scores, played by movie palace orchestras, in big nightclub production numbers and on Broadway. The MMM ethic even surfaces in Hollywood’s Mid-Atlantic accent, used by William Powell, Katherine Hepburn, and others—not quite American, not quite British; another manifestation of the low/high.
The next essay, Arranging Orientalism for Whiteman by Ryan Raul Banagale is the most specifically “musicological.” It uses musical examples to show how Whiteman helped to codify “orientalism” in American music. Banagale says there are more than 170 examples of arrangements in Whiteman’s music using musical cues of “Orientalism”: pentatonic scales, parallel fourths, staccato rhythms, primitive bass ostinatos and gongs.
Arthur Lange, one of Whiteman’s key arrangers, wrote an influential book Arranging for the Modern Dance Orchestra, that outlines “characteristic effects” for different groups—Oriental, Irish, Indian, Jewish and Russian.
The author says that although arrangements are updated through time, the orientalist strain persists and continues to manifest the “inherent white supremacist underpinnings also manifested through the public sonic arrangement and performance of these songs.”
The next essay is Concertized Jazz. The Divergent Motives of Whiteman (1924) and Goodman (1938). Author Sarah Caissie Provost compares the attitudes of Whiteman and Benny Goodman toward the concert hall. She says that both are white-filtered, educative, history oriented, using extensive program notes. However, Whiteman believed that the future of jazz was in the concert hall, while Goodman said that jazz was worthy of the concert hall. Of course, Whiteman was a generation ahead of Goodman.
I would take exception to Provost’s statement that “no black jazz musicians were recorded until King Oliver’s Creole Orchestra’s 1923 recordings.” There was Kid Ory in 1922, arguably, Wilbur Sweatman in 1917 and many individual black musicians on blues recordings in the early ’20s—not to mention piano rolls.
Next is “Symphonised Syncopation.” Paul Whiteman in the United Kingdom and Europe in the 1920s. By Catherine Tackley. This essay will be of interest to anyone who wants to know more about the early history of jazz in Britain. Tackley makes the case that the way Whiteman’s style was characterized by the media in Britain during his 1923 sojourn influenced him to do the Aeolian Hall concert the following year.
There’s also interesting information on the flow (or lack of flow) between the U.S. and Britain that came as a result of Union restrictions.
The penultimate essay is RCA v. Whiteman and the Case for Radio Broadcast Rights by Katherine M. Leo. For me, this and the essay about Modern Metropolitan Music are the two most important in Beyond the Bandstand.
I learned about Whiteman’s long involvement in musicians’ support orgs—ASCAP, NAB, AFM and the less known NAPA (Natl Ass of Performing Artists). I also hadn’t known of his importance in copyright, royalty and intellectual property issues, including the right for musicians to get paid for having their records played on the radio. It’s important enough for me to give a brief chronology of what Leo covers in this essay.
Through the 1930s, records were still being treated the way they were in the Copyright Act of 1909 which excluded records as intellectual property-as opposed to notated compositions. In 1932, Fred Waring and other major bands stopped making records. They got major labels to put on the label “Not Licensed for Radio Broadcast” but it had little effect.
NAPA was formed in 1935 to provide stronger copyright support for musicians. They unsuccessfully lobbied Congress. They sued WDAS in Philly, who said they’d legally bought the records and could therefore play them. NAPA won a limited victory and the court strengthened the licensing agreement on record labels.
Whiteman filed suit against WNEW in 1936. He based it on two things. First, a legal loophole: a Common Law Property Right in unpublished music; in this case, Whiteman records. Secondly, he argued that having his records played forced him to compete against himself in negotiations with sponsors of live broadcasts of his orchestra.
RCA joined the lawsuit but also cross-sued Whiteman, as RCA controlled the early Whiteman catalog and thought they should get any money received through the lawsuit.
Whiteman withdrew from the suit at the last minute, because he had in fact signed away contractual rights to Victor—owned by RCA. Victor said it was up to Whiteman to try and get separate broadcast rights.
Whiteman did testify at the trial, which was widely covered. The court decided in favor of NAPA—that Whiteman had a common law property right to recordings and granted an injunction against WNEW. However, the judge ruled that he had signed over the rights to RCA Victor. At the same time, he said that listeners couldn’t tell which company made the music so RCA didn’t have any additional claim to their records as a “separable creative product.”
This was confusing, but seemed like a recognition that musicians could have some control over the conditions in which their records were played on the radio. NAPA began to establish a fund to pay musicians from whatever pool of money came from radio negotiations.
However, Whiteman sued to reverse the decision that he’d given away the rights to RCA and in the Court of Appeals, Judge Learned Hand said Whiteman’s copyright monopoly ended with the sale of the record, granting full rights to the radio station.
The Musicians Union strikes in the 1940s were a continuation of this struggle, and some concessions were granted, but RCA v Whiteman remained law until Capital Records v. Mercury Records Corp. That 1955 ruling said that a “Record sale did not relinquish the right to reproduce a record. Whiteman had made a significant contribution to this process.
The final essay is Integration and Segregation in Whiteman’s Music Television 1948-55 by W. Anthony Sheppard. Those who know of Whiteman’s earlier musical career might not be aware of how active he was in the early days of television. Whiteman was Music Director at ABC and had two shows: The Goodyear Review was middlebrow and segregated. The other, TV Teen Club tied in with other efforts Whiteman made to combat juvenile delinquency, including sponsoring youth talent contests and dances. TV Teen Club was unusual for the day in that it was integrated. Whiteman’s shows presented a mixed racial picture. There were black contest winners, including Leslie Uggams, who won a lot of contests. There was also some blackface and white performers substituting for black.
Both shows allowed him to present the kind of music that had made him famous, while making a nod to Rock and Roll. He even served as a judge at the “World Rock and Roll Championship” in Lambertville, NJ, in 1966, a year before he died.
The Afterword is by Elijah Wald, who has written a great deal about Whiteman. He gives a good historical overview of Whiteman’s accomplishments and talks about the various cases for and against him as an influence worthy of our attention.
Syncopated Times readers may find some of the essays in Beyond the Bandstand heavy going. However, several are worth your time.
Beyond the Bandstand
Paul Whiteman in American Musical Culture
Edited by W. Anthony Sheppard
University of Illinois Press; 330 pages
www.press.uillinois.edu
Cloth: $125; ISBN: 978-0-252-04610-0
Paper: $32; ISBN: 978-0-252-08820-9
eBook: $19.95; ISBN: 978-0-252-04732-9
Steve Provizer is a brass player, arranger and writer. He has written about jazz for a number of print and online publications and has blogged for a number of years at: brilliantcornersabostonjazzblog.blogspot.com. He is also a proud member of the Screen Actors Guild.
