Cultural Tensions in American Popular Culture

“No Sweat” versus “Watch Me Sweat”—Dancing with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly

To be human is to feel this dual tug toward artifice and freedom from artifice, toward mastery and being mastered. Mastering through craft and Reason or mastered by inspiration or the unconscious, we come to know this world or the transcendent, and to do the world’s or (maybe) the Transcendent’s will. In the middle of these two extreme states exists the missing third, where having mastered our instrument—perhaps ourselves— we can let go, certain that we will do the right thing. That middle state, from whichever source, is the state that improvisers both embody and ambivalently long for and that first century rhetorician Quintilian described: “The greatest fruit of our studies, the richest harvest of our long labor.”

That tension, and sometimes that resolution, lie behind much of the popular culture of the 20th century.

According to Life magazine, along with the Lindy Hop, tap is America’s “only native and original dance form.” It shares that uniqueness, too, with jazz which also sought to humanize modern, industrial life. Sally Sommer, a leading expert on dance in American popular culture, distinguishes between African-derived tap dancing and European-derived ballet aesthetics: “one expresses the self, the other perfection” (quoted in Dinerstein 226). Seeking perfection privileges those linear, step-by-step, structured human faculties that enable us to achieve mastery. Ballet’s endless hours of repetitive training and exercise at the barre come to mind. Learning tap is, of course, no less arduous, nor less demanding. But seeking to express the self privileges non-linear, unstructured human faculties by which the self can be known: intuition, instinct, the unconscious. Eleanor

Powell and Fred Astaire both said they often dreamed their dance routines. Ballet has a long tradition of innovation (think Balanchine), but its goal is to participate in and to confirm the European tradition of artifice. Ballet training is largely given to learning the traditional repertoire of steps. It’s hard to imagine anything less “natural” and more artificial than dancing en pointe. Not that tap dancing is innately natural or any less arduous, and yet, as Joel Dinerstein argues in his monumental study of dance in the machine age, tap emerged as a “rhythmic organization of industrial noise.” Dinerstein quotes the great modernist architect LeCorbusier who, visiting New York in 1935 found things he had not experienced in Europe: “New sounds … the grinding of the streetcars, the unchained madness of the subway, the pounding of machines in factories” and, LeCorbusier adds, “[f]rom this new uproar [African Americans] make music” (qtd Dinerstein 4). Tap humanized what otherwise dehumanized, made “natural” what was unnatural. Tap has its repertoire of steps, just as machines do. But where a machine is locked into its steps, in tap innovation is key. For the tap icon John W. Bubbles “creating new steps is the only worthwhile challenge and achievement in the art.” As that other icon of the modern age Ezra Pound, demanded, “make it new.

Tap predates the premiere of Igor Stravinky’s Rite of Spring (1913), but the ballet anticipates how American dance, tap and swing, would come to transform industrial noise. Commissioned by famous impresario Serge Diaghilev and danced by Diagilev’s Ballets Russes, Stravinsky’s dissonant Rite of Spring pushed the envelope of ballet so far that, like Rock and Roll in its day, its Paris premiere caused a riot. For Anglo-American poet

T. S. Eliot who was in the audience that night in May, 1913, Stravinsky’s music, a puzzling combination of the primitive and the modern, seemed to transform “the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life; and to transform these despairing noises into music.” Together, Eliot and Stravinsky anticipated the “rhythmic organization of industrial noise” effected by modern dance: tap and swing.

Appropriating machine rhythms fulfills the first two criteria Toni Morrison sets for “Black art”: “it must have the ability to use found objects, the appearance of using found things.” When those accustomed to classical dance dismiss tap it is often because tap dancers make it look effortless— fulfilling Morrison’s third criterion. In the spirit of improvisation, effortlessness conveys a freedom from outmoded conventions, conventions to which ballet is dedicated. “Tap,” for dancer Chuck Green, “is all about freedom.” Those qualities, effortlessness, freedom and innovation, are improvisation’s signatures.

Often compared, the tap-dancers Fred Astaire (1899-1987) and Gene Kelly (1912-1996) provide almost textbook versions of the rhetorics of spontaneity and of craft. A study in contrasts, Astaire, lean and lanky, is effortless elegance. Kelly, more muscular and earth-bound, is brute force, Marlon Brando to Astaire’s Cary Grant, he once said. Kelly’s film narratives are often about life’s challenges overcome by hard work. Astaire’s characters, unassuming, taking life as it comes, embody Trickster’s characteristic bravado and nonchalance. For the great French dancer Leslie Caron, who partnered with both, Astaire, was just made for dancing. You could see him walk in the streets and it was almost like he was dancing. There was a swing to it and a rhythm to it…. And he heard the music; he played with it, he danced with it, he understood it so well…. Everything was easy for him… He also had fun ideas—I think he’s the dancer who made fun of himself the most. He would goof around and the result is lovely. You can see it on the screen.

By contrast, Caron adds, Kelly “was very demanding and very professional. He didn’t think dancing was fun. He really thought it was hard work.” For commentator Jennifer Walsh, tellingly, Kelly “inspires a person to think that if she just tries hard enough, she might be able to do what he does. Fred’s dancing says, ‘Pfft. Forget it. You’ll never be this good.’” Totally controlled and virtuosic, nonetheless Astaire’s dancing embraces and privileges unstructured, embodied emotion. Equally controlled and virtuosic, Kelly is all about structure. Hey, you can do that. First, you…

For Kelly two plus two always make four; Astaire is charmed by, and means to charm us with, the notion that sometimes two plus two make five.

Astaire rehearsed endlessly to perfect his dance numbers but makes them seem the product of the moment. Athletic and physical, Kelly wants you to see him sweat. Their only duet together, “The Babbitt and the Bromide” from Ziegfeld Follies (1946), is aptly set up by a dialogue where Astaire disguises their hard work and Kelly calls attention to it:

Astaire: Say, why don’t we ad lib something together then.

Kelly: Whip it up right here on the spot? Like the one we’ve been rehearsing for 2 weeks?

Astaire was so determined to give the impression of being unrehearsed that he hired guards to keep his rehearsals private. Yet everyone testified to his obsessive rehearsing.

Many of the narrative lead-ins to Astaire’s dance routines work hard to give the impression of not working hard at all. In Royal Wedding (1951), he “improvises” the famous hat rack duet when his dancing partner (Jane Powell) doesn’t show up for their planned rehearsal—just to kill time, just to play. Astaire rehearsed with more than 30 commercially available hat racks before insisting the prop department build one he could work (or play) with.

The famous “Slap that Bass” number in Shall We Dance (1937) is another rich example. Astaire plays a ballet dancer billed as Petrov to secure his status in the ballet world where he is an established star. But, he’s happy to declare his all-American name, with a wink, almost tap dancing with his tongue: “Pete P. Peters from Philadelphia PA.” He’s fallen for a music hall dance star, the equally all-American Linda Keene (Ginger Rogers). From the point of view of Pete Peters’s ballet world, Keene’s tap dancing is déclassé. But Pete Peters, despite being a ballet marquee principal, is smitten both with her and with tap. Peters follows Keene from Paris to

New York to woo her. During the trans-Atlantic passage, his far tonier but bumbling Brtiish manager Jeffrey Baird (Edward Everett Horton) watches a ballet rehearsal on deck, surrounded by a bevy of scantily clad young women. Meanwhile, Peters is belowdecks in the engine room learning some new licks, listening to the engine room crew perform a song that promises to cure the world’s problems brought on by the Machine Age by using machine rhythms as Morrisonian “found objects.”

Busby Berkeley’s highly-stylized and -produced routines displayed batteries of identity-less young women dancing in geometric, kaleidoscopic lockstep. These too were a response to mechanization. But Berkeley identified, as it were, with the oppressor. Plenty of fun, nonetheless his response was just a reaffirmation of the machine age’s call. His routines only imitated and did not transcend the machine, did not leap into freedom.

In “Slap that Base,” having appropriated the Black band’s rhythms and aesthetic, Astaire proceeds in dance to challenge the machinery of the engine room—John Henry-fashion, another appropriation.

Tap here, as improvisation always does, points out the flaw in orderly systems. The machine repeats itself over and over with power and to great effect, building the modern world. But like most systems, it is rigid. It cannot veer off in new directions. Perfectly structured, it cannot leap into non-structure. To do so is just to throw a rod, break a cog, or run off the rails. Improv, with its elasticity (and irony) instead creates something new. Freedom. It is the signifying response—yes, and…—to mechanization’s call.

Astaire’s on-screen persona is pure Trickster. While his manager inhabits the elite spaces on this transatlantic ship, going below-deck, Astaire crosses boundaries. This norm-breaking and infringement of hierarchical space is characteristic of improvisation’s perennial persona: Trickster. Vanity Fair in 1928, discussing four iconic tap dancers (including Astaire), speaks of them as “clowns of extraordinary motion.” For critic Robert Sklar, for all his elegance, Astaire had “a touch of the gutter.”

Cagney once remarked, “you know, Freddie, you’ve got a touch of the hoodlum in you.” In The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), dismissing a stuff shirt, Astaire announces, “Aw, that fellow brings out the gangster in me.” Especially in the early Ginger Roger vehicles Shall we Dance and Swing that Music, Astaire always plays the outsider, a Trickster who playfully challenges the received hierarchies. Like the Greek Trickster Hermes, Pete P. Peterson is a charming bounder, equally comfortable among stuff shirts in high places as among clowns and gangsters or in the gutter.

In Swing Time (1936), Lucky Garnett (Astaire), an inveterate gambler (trickster Hermes is the god of chance), scowls ironically at the dance studio’s slogan where he meets and begins to woo Penny Carroll (Rogers). It reads:

To Know How to Dance is To Know How to Control Yourself

Astaire, pausing at the threshold—Trickster is the lord of gateways and portals—looks over this chestnut and dismisses it with a knowing smirk. Like improvisation’s Trickster figure, Astaire is in no need of the constrictions that self-control demands. He devalues it.

Astaire’s persona, needing no character development—again like Trickster—seems to leap (like mētic goddess Athene in her armor) fullyformed onto the screen, tuxedo-clad. In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, just born, the infant Hermes leaps from his cradle ready to invent, trick, lie, and cajole. Charlie Chaplin had this experience when he first put together and donned his Tramp costume: “For me he was fixed, complete,” he wrote in his autobiography, “the moment I looked in the mirror and saw him for the first time, and yet even now I don’t know all the things that are to be known about him” (quoted in Impro, 145).

By contrast, in Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain (1952), the narrative twice recounts (once in a flashback, once as a story within a story) how Don Lockwood (Kelly) claws his way to Hollywood step by step through various levels of touring vaudeville.

For Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine, “‘Slap That Bass’ encodes a classic primitivist framework. Astaire goes to the ‘lower’ classes—the lessevolved, folk primitive cultures—for the raw, instinctive passion lacking in ‘civilization’” (245). This primitivist framework is characteristic of improvisation, inscribed in the gesture of spontaneity: this is good because “natural,” innocent of hard work and sophistication. Hermes’ birthplace is Arcadia, traditional setting for pastoral, the genre where shepherds woo shepherdesses during apparently workfree endless summers. Aspiring to Olympus, Hermes is essentially a rube, but one who gives such hierarchical distinctions no mind. Hermes is just Hermes, class distinctions be damned. I won’t make too much of Astaire’s lifelong choreographic collaborator’s name: Hermes Pan. Pan, another Trickster god, was a shortened form of the choreographer’s impossibly long Greek name, Panagiotopoulos. Pan is Hermes’s offspring. Surely as a Greek he must have settled on lascivious “Pan” with a wink worthy of Astaire’s partner in crime.

Improvisation reaches back to a time well before democracy as we know it found the soil to take root. But democracy is deeply inscribed in improv. Improvisation’s affirmation of vitality ultimately tends to level hierarchies, which makes improvisation throb with a democratic impulse.

Mixed-race Hermes’s effort to gain Olympus, Wordsworth’s celebration of the peasantry, Whitman’s celebration of, well, everything, both anticipate the leveling of hierarchies that followed World War 1, which aristocrats did so much tragically to muddle. Jazz, with its commitment to hearing what every voice has to say even if it’s a misplaced chord, Herbie Handcock’s “rotten fruit,” is the greatest democratic expression. Thumbing his nose at the normative, Astaire projects Bakhtin’s carnivalesque “realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance.”

The Tinkering of Improvisation and Virtuosity—The Birth of Jazz

Struggling to define jazz, the Encyclopedia Britannica lands upon improvisation as its defining characteristic: one important aspect of jazz clearly does distinguish it from other traditional musical areas, especially from classical music: the jazz performer is primarily or wholly a creative, improvising composer—his own composer, as it were—whereas in classical music the performer typically expresses and interprets someone else’s composition.

The encyclopedia then celebrates composers and arrangers like Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn as exemplary. Improvisation played a role in Ellington’s exquisite orchestrations, but they were minimal and confined to the breaks or solos. What was tighter than an Ellington-Strayhorn orchestral arrangement? In first generation New Orleans jazz, improvisation had a role not only in solos but within all the collective, polyrhythmic lines of which the music is composed—in the moment of its presentation.

The New Yorker’s jazz critic Whitney Balliet called jazz “the sound of surprise.” That was truer of first-generation New Orleans jazz. Hot or raggedy music, as it was first called by its creators, offers momentary freedom from the straitjacket of Euro-centric decorum. Originally a dance music, hot jazz, deeply rooted in the polyrhythms of Congo Square, embodies the surprise of being mastered by rhythm. It invites us in dance to be mastered ourselves. (As New Orleans jazz great Danny Barker said “if you can’t dance to this music, there’s something wrong with you”). Jelly Roll Morton, big band swing, and later cool jazz employ improvisation but embody and project craftsmanship and mastery. However much they incorporate improvisational breaks and solos, such jazz presents itself first and last as carefully composed and arranged—like Ellington’s always well-tailored tuxedo—as something to be admired.

These generalizations about jazz types are inevitably riddled with exceptions. Nonetheless, these rhetorical effects are distinct and unmistakable. Seeking to avoid the “plantation character” they saw in Louis Armstrong’s desire to entertain and please a mostly white paying audience, cool, craftsmanly jazz embraced the mediation of intellect. Swing to the contrary notwithstanding, much of cool jazz is often music you can’t dance to. Hot jazz aspires to that state of immediacy Wynton Marsalis, a post-bop but cool musician himself, describes when he says of Louis Armstrong, “As a musician, technically, he’s on the highest possible level, because there’s no barrier between the horn and his soul.”1 Dizzy and Miles retracted their rejection of Pops as entertainer. Gillespie, eventually, “began to recognize what I had considered Pops’ grinning in the face of racism as his absolute refusal to let anything, even anger about racism, steal the joy from his life.”

Marsalis’ neo-traditionalism by contrast is mediated by his deep knowledge of jazz history. His covers, for example Mr. Jelly Lord, are superbly and tightly crafted covers. When Wynton has composed, the accent has been upon tradition. He explores jazz’s Gospel roots in his Pulitzer Prize winning In This House, On This Morning and in Abyssinian: A Gospel Celebration. With Ghanaian drummer Yacub Addy he explores its African roots in Congo Square, a testament to the birthplace of jazz where slaves were allowed to play their traditional drums and pushed back against the culture embodied by New Orleans’s cartesian grid. Wynton premiered the album with Addy at Congo Square. A second line parade preceded their mounting the bandstand. We think of spontaneity as pegged to originality, but the nature of spontaneity’s value—as of originality—is contextual. Mediated by the jazz tradition, Marsalis creates great art. “Unmediated”—note the scare quotes—Louis Armstrong, arguably the greatest artist of the twentieth century, surpasses what mere art can achieve.

Armstrong was the catalyst for the union of heart and head that was essential to the emergence of jazz as we know it (and one reason the strict opposition of head and heart breaks down). New Orleans musicians in the 1890s were distinguished by those who could read music and those who could not. Readers—those who played by reading composed scores—were likely to be French Creoles, descendants of the free men of color (gens de couleur libres ) who were offspring of plantation owners and their slaves or concubines and likely to be francophone or bilingual. They were schooled in European culture and religion, decorous, rule-bound Catholicism (though often syncretized with vestiges of African religion). They lived downtown across Canal Street in or near the French Quarter. Their neighbors (and often their paternal families, acknowledged or not) were likely to be the descendants of white plantation owners.

1 Stephanie Bennett, producer, Let the Good Times Role: A Film about the Roots of American Music, DVD, Delilah Music Pictures in Association with Island Visual Arts, 1992; emphasis added.

Across Canal, uptown, though just blocks away, was another world. There, unschooled non-readers like Buddy Bolden (1877-1931) played a ferocious and propulsive Afro-centric, spiritualist church-infused, polyrhythmic music. Bolden and his cohorts of the first generation were more likely to have descended from the enslaved people who came from plantations to New Orleans during Reconstruction. They sought to escape the brutality of White Councils—called the KKK elsewhere. Just blocks apart, these were separate cultures. MayAnn Albert Armstrong, mother to Louis, was born upriver on a plantation in Boutte and settled at Liberty and Perdido (freedom and lost) Streets upriver from Canal.

Many, like MayAnn’s legendary son, were influenced by the spiritualist churches deeply imbued with African spirituality and the rhythms which embodied it: polyrhythmic, call-and-response, syncopated, and improvised. Non-readers, they were paradoxically called “head” musicians because what they played came from their head not the page. These often-darker skinned musicians and their hot, wild music were at first disdained by the lighter skinned Creoles as “raggedy,” or worse. Jazz, originally “jass,” referred to sexual intercourse. King Oliver, Armstrong’s mentor and lodestar, is said never to have overcome the “shame” of his dark skin. Uptown Blacks called downtown Creoles “dicty,” pretentious.

Skin tone is a loaded issue in African American culture especially in New Orleans with its large population of light-skinned Creoles who in the Treme neighborhood established the first free-black community in America and enjoyed freedoms and status well above their darker, uptown neighbors. The Autocrat Club in Treme well into the 20th century used a “paper bag test” to manage admittance: if you were darker than a paper bag, you were not welcome. Reconstruction which had overseen race relations in the south after the Civil War ended partly in response to the Battle of Liberty Place (1874) when 5000 members of the White League, a paramilitary organization made up of Confederate veterans and New Orleanian blue-bloods, and future leaders of the Mardi Gras Krewes attacked and took over the Federal Custom House on Canal Street. The Federal troops removed, the entitlements free people of color had enjoyed were soon lost. Suddenly they were treated no better than the formerly enslaved, subject to the same discrimination and harassment to suppress their voting.

Jazz emerged not long after. The civil rights action that led to the disastrous Jim Crow decision in the Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)—which made “separate but equal” the law of the land— had not been an effort to regain rights for all African Americans but only for mixed-race Creoles. The action was organized by the Comité des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens)—their French name an index of their birth and Tremé neighborhood—to challenge Louisiana’s Separate Car Act of 1890. Homer Plessy was so light skinned that he had to signal to the conductor of the train that he didn’t belong in the train car where he sat so the law could be challenged in the courts. Plessy v. Ferguson—separate but equal—was the disastrous result. It made Jim Crow the law of the land. Twenty years later only the virtuosity of the young, unschooled Louis Armstrong was able to begin to break down the barrier between Black and Creole. Jazz as we know it—improvised and virtuoso—is a result of the wedding of those forces from uptown and down: hot and cool, soulful and intellective.

“Why am I So Black and Blue,” one of Armstrong’s transgressive masterpieces, was created in the aftermath of that wedding. Composed by light-skinned Fats Waller with lyrics by aristocratic Andy Razaf (grand-nephew to the queen of Madagascar), the song was introduced in the Broadway musical Hot Chocolates. The narrative setting for the song was a dark-skinned ingenue lamenting that she is not light-skinned (“yeller”) enough:

Out in the street, shufflin’ feet

Couples passin’ two by two

While here am I, left high and dry

Black, and ‘cause I’m black I’m blue

Browns and yellers, all have fellers

Gentlemen prefer them light

Wish I could fade, can’t make the grade

Nothing but dark days in sight

Armstrong lopped off her longing to be a mulatto (“Gentlemen prefer them light”). He made it a call for empathy for all non-whites, not just the “browns and yellers”:

Cold empty bed, springs hard as lead

Feels like ol’ Ned wished I was dead

What did I do to be so black and blue

Even the mouse ran from my house

They laugh at you and scorn you too

What did I do to be so black and blue

I’m white inside but that don’t help my case

‘Cause I can’t hide what is in my face

How would it end, ain’t got a friend

My only sin is in my skin

What did I do to be so black and blue

How would it end, ain’t got a friend

My only sin is in my skin

What did I do to be so black and blue

Armstrong’s raspy, seemingly untutored voice is another gesture that situates his work in the culture of spontaneity. In his own telling it was

Tillie Karnovsky, the wife of the Orthodox Jewish rag and bone merchant on Rampart Street whose Russian lullabies taught him to sing from the heart. The Karnofskys had virtually adopted him. Their building, an empty shell despite its historical significance, collapsed in Hurricane Ida. The most extreme version of that heartfelt singing was scat, which if Armstrong didn’t invent, he at least popularized. Scat presents itself as vocalization mastered by , taken over by, rhythm and melody. If Pops didn’t invent scat when he dropped his sheet music while recording “Heebie Jeebies,” as the legend goes, it’s an interesting mythic meme connecting him to Trickster, lord of chance and accident, good or ill. Stumble over a tortoise as Hermes does in the Homeric Hymn and invent the lyre. Or drop your sheet music, and create the means of great art. Such is the irrational art of Trickster, making a way out of no way.

We can get at how improv works, its rhetoric of the careless and uncrafted, by lingering over scat another moment. Compare for a moment

Louis’ singing, inspired by Tillie’s Russian lullabies to sing from the heart, to Frank Sinatra’s singing. In general, Louis’s rasp,—“as smooth as a tired piece of sandpaper calling to its mate” (Paul Kael, 5001 Nights a the Movies, 654)—compares unfavorably to Frank’s voice. “The Voice,” as it was called, is clear as a bell, smooth as satin—choose your favorite cliché. Louis’s technique, which seems the wrong word to describe it, for it seems without technique, without craft, is so invisible that many imagined Louis “a primitive genius” or “endearing child of nature” (Collier, 3).

I love Sinatra’s singing and I’m not going to suggest that lonely Frank is not soulful, but where Louis is about heart, Sinatra is all about craft Craft—his dedication to the technical aspects of breathing and phrasing, timbre and diction—is what Sinatra is about (see Pete Hamill, Why Sinatra Matters). And Sinatra and scat? Google those words and what you get is “Stranger in the Night.” Period. “Scooby doobie doo”: a closing that calculatedly if belatedly, half-heartedly to my ear, rides the wave of scat’s popularity. And if you think “scoobie doobie doo” came from the heart rather than from sheet music, I have a bridge to Hoboken to sell you.

Whoever invented it, Louis’s scat was an inevitable articulation of the blues and spirituals that by bending and worrying pitch produce the jagged harmonies, dissonance, and blue notes that have no place in the rationality of Western harmony or solfège. Blue notes literally have no place on the do re mi scale. The nonsense, read, irrational, syllables of scat create something marginal, outside the mainstream and dominant culture, but nonetheless new and lasting—straight, unmediated, from the heart and soul.

Calculated Outrageousness—The Godfather of Soul and Brother Bach

The marriage of opposing rhetorics—spontaneity and craft—is embodied again in one distant relative of the jazz tradition, the Godfather of Soul, James Brown. In bandleader Paul Shaffer’s words, Brown is “the most ferocious barbarian of all,” and yet his performances intertwine mastery and being mastered by soul.1 In a New Yorker profile, Philip Gourevitch describes how his performances were at once literally spontaneous and “orchestrated according to the most rigorous discipline”:

Although no two nights are the same, and much of what you see and hear when he’s onstage is truly spontaneous, the dazzle of these unpredictable moments is grounded in his ensemble’s dazzling tightness. He proceeds without song lists, conducting fiercely drilled sidemen and sidewomen through each split-second transition with an elaborate vocabulary of hand signals. “It’s like a quarterback—I call the songs as we go,” he says. (Gourevitch, “Mr. Brown,” in New Yorker, July 29, 2002, p. 51)

“Even in his earliest, wildest days,” Gourevitch continues, his outrageousness was carefully calculated to convey that, while he cannot be contained, he is always in control. In contrast to the effortlessness that so many performers strive for in their quest to exhibit mastery, James Brown makes the display of effort one of the most striking features of his art[…]. He is the image of abandon, yet his precision remains absolute, his equilibrium is never shaken, there is no abandon. (54.)

Like Gene Kelly’s, James Brown’s performances insist on his effortful spontaneity, effortful effortlessness, as it were. In this he is not unlike J.S. Bach who conveys the magisterial effort of his improvising during a royal visit

The King admired the learned manner in which his subject was thus executed extempore; and, probably to see how far an art could be carried, expressed a wish to hear a Fugue with six Obligato parts. But as it was not every subject that is fit for such full harmony, Bach chose one himself, and immediately executed it to the astonishment of all present in the same magnificent and learned manner as he had done that of the King. (Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 7)

Improvising “a Fugue with six Obbligato parts,” as Douglas Hofstadter remarks, is like “playing … sixty simultaneous blindfold games of chess, and winning them all,” or we might now add, like doing flying splits from the theatre balcony. Though both were prodigies and child performers, surely it’s surprising that Bach and James Brown might share anything. Were artists so heterogeneous ever yoked? Yet, what Gourevitch says about Brown’s “outrageousness” applies to both, that it was “carefully calculated to convey that, while he cannot be contained, he is always totally in control.” (Gourevitch, “Mr. Brown,” p. 51).

Why? What motivates this insistence either on effortful effortlessness or effortless effort? Clearly with Bach it is a way to display his extraordinary genius, his total mastery. Regarding his improvising, there seems to be no recourse to divine inspiration to explain his prowess, except perhaps that he had a generalized divine gift. Brown shares Bach’s well-earned grandiosity. In discussing the recording and remixing process he explains that his improvised performances are sacrosanct: “when it comes from me, it’s the real thing[…]. It’s God.” Compare Kerouac, who complained to Robert Giroux, who wanted to cut up the scroll to revise On the Road, “This manuscript has been dictated by the Holy Ghost.” (qtd Cunnell, 52). Kerouac doesn’t mention which member of the Trinity helped him edit for six years to get it to press.

Like Kerouac, Brown’s motivation seems to be at least in part political, an expression of his personal version of Black pride. As Gourevitch writes, “This was the man whose ultimate civil-rights-era message song was ‘I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I’ll Get it Myself)’” (57-58). Brown projects an “image of abandon, yet his precision remains absolute, his equilibrium is never shaken, there is no abandon.”

Motown (founded 1959) is James Brown’s contemporary (“Please Please Please,” 1958). The Motown Sound’s perfection also marries the rhetorics of improv and virtuosity. But the latter, virtuosity and craft, is clearly in the driver’s seat. Motown’s backup band The Funk Brothers, drawn from Detroit’s robust jazz and blues scene, justly prided themselves on their improvisational skills and a groove that grabbed the listener’s pulse. New Orleans clarinetist and saxophonist Charlie Gabriel, now with Preservation Hall Jazz Band, played with the Funk Brothers on many of Motown’s greatest songs.2 Like The Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s first jazz recording, “Livery Stable Blues,” with its transgressive, novelty barnyard sounds, The Funk Brothers were known not only for their propulsive groove but also for their use of odd instrumentation. Pianist Earl Van Dyke played a toy piano on the introduction to the Temptations’ “It’s Growing.” For “Dancing in the Street” heavy chains were shaken in the echo chamber to suggest the street riots the song warned against and celebrated. Greil Marcus wonders: “when it released Martha and the

2 In an online interview, poet and spoken word artist John Sinclair, a Flint, MI native, said that the Motown Sound was “based on Cosimo’s studio” (where jazz players helped shape early rock and roll and R&B) and that other, now legendary New Orleans musicians came up to help shape the Funk Brothers’ sound: drummer Smoky Johnson, singer Johnny Adams, saxophonist Kidd Jordan, and pianist Earl King. NOLA Reconnect: A Virtual Visit to New Orleans. October 16, 2020.

Vandellas’ ‘Dancing in the Street’ in 1964, did anyone at Hitsville USA on West Grand Boulevard know, as people would discover, sing, and trumpet in Watts a year later and in Detroit, on Woodward Avenue, two years after that, that the song was about a riot, a refusal, a willingness to tear a city down to make it right?” The Funk Brothers’ improvisational skills were so invisible that a full-length documentary was made ( Standing in the Shadows of Motown, 2002) to bring them to the attention of Temptations fans. The Funk Brothers carried Motown’s disruptive core, but its overt presentation to the world was virtuosity, perfection.

The Motown Sound was engineered by its founder Barry Gordy Jr. who, tired of his job on the Lincoln-Mercury assembly line, wondered if he could reproduce Henry Ford’s masterstroke in the music industry. The accent fell on engineered. Tight and disciplined like a Ford assembly line, Gordy’s Motown Sound was, adds Benjaminson, “Afro-American tradition updated by the incessant pounding of the punch press and buffed to a shiny gloss by contact with a prosperous urban society.” As fellow Detroiter Greil Marcus recounts, listening to the first Motown records, you’d be “stunned that anything could be this good, this perfect.”

That perfection was no accident. Motown performers, many of them teenagers with loads of talent, were put through what Gordy called “Quality Control.” Gordy described his “factory-type operation” as “Detroit’s other world-famous assembly line.” Gordy’s recording studio, Hitsville USA, included separate stations where aspiring performers learned how to walk on stage, how to dance expressively with high gloss and intricate coordination, how to dress, what to say between songs, what a nightclub act involved. The Motown group Gladys Knight & the Pips referred to a childhood nickname. But, having drunk Gordy’s Kool-Aid, Knight explained that it stood for “Perfection in Performance.”

Like James Brown informed by the civil rights movement, Gordy’s perfection had a purpose, the elevation of his race. The high gloss and intricate coordination of harmonies, dance steps, and costumes were meant not only to appeal to a crossover audience for commercial reasons, but also to make the case for African American equality. Gordy sought to transgress and to change the status quo of Jim Crow America not by confrontation but by means of aesthetic appeal. Consider, from about the same moment in America’s racist history, transgressive comedian Lenny Bruce’s bit on racism. He asks you to imagine yourself The Imperial Wizard of the KKK, and you have a choice to make:

You have the choice of spending fifteen years married to a woman, a black woman or a white woman. Fifteen years kissing and hugging and sleeping real close on hot nights. With a black, black woman or a white, white woman. The white woman is Kate Smith. And the black woman is Lena Horne. So you’re not concerned with black or white anymore, are you? You are concerned with how cute or how pretty. Then let’s really get basic and persecute ugly people!

Bruce’s logic didn’t take hold but Gordy’s Motown, like the first generation of jazz and like the Godfather of Funk, helped to humanize African Americans for white audiences. James Brown used the shock of his funk to do so, Motown the allure of its virtuosity with funk playing a hidden if powerful role.

Motown, then, was created in a step by step, structured process underpropped by the Funk Brothers’ mostly invisible, but deeply felt driving groove. The Funk Brothers documentary makes no effort to explain or teach funk, just finally to give it voice and to bear witness. The film’s message: The Temps stood on the shoulders of invisible giants whose art was beyond the reach of art.

Bruce’s comedy was unscripted, tying together well-honed riffs like this one, with meandering monologues. Bruce improvised. But, then, his challenge to the normative system was more confrontational than Gordy’s and he paid for it with the police harassment that hounded him to an early grave.

Of Astaire’s superb appropriations we can say at best that he meant well. And that, unlike Gene Kelly, he wasn’t entirely white bread.