They had a right to sing the blues: as blacks' social and economic circumstances have improved, their music has taken a nosedive. American culture at large has abetted the decline, and suffered from it

National Review, July 8, 1991 by Tom Bethell

Within the lifetime of some of its earliest practitioners, the jazz tradition, like the European one before it, succumbed to an experimental avant garde. Every new experiment was praised by critics who noted that European innovators, too, had "freed" music from its shackles. (But they failed to note its subsequent decline.) In 1945 Louis Armstrong remarked that bebop, then the rage in New York, was "filled with malice," a daring criticism. The music had degenerated into empty displays of technique.

But the decline didn't matter, because new forms appeared; the spotlight moved on. They may not have had the sophistication of Jelly Roll Morton, but Jimmy Yancey and Meade Lux Lewis were playing some wonderful boogie-woogie piano in Chicago. Guitars were electrified, and soon there was another, although lesser, peak with the performances of blues singers like John Lee Hooker in the late Fifties. The music was popularized in Memphis, prettified in Liverpool, and presented, finally, by Ed Sullivan.

The English groups who played before mass audiences in the Sixties and Seventies were candid enough to feature the bands whose recordings they had faithfully imitated. But the musicians so honored-B. B. lung and Howlin' Wolf, for example-were rapidly reduced by the exposure to a stale repertoire of mannerisms. Here we come to something that has been peculiar to American music. It is almost a law that the early recordings of a given musician will turn out to be his best. There are exceptions, but mostly we find this familiar pattern of discovery, peak, and prolonged decline. The market may be the problem. Old hits are demanded by new audiences, so that crowd-pleasing tricks are repeated ad nauseam. Resort to the tried-and-true guarantees a certain success, but artistic maturation must have been thwarted time and again as a result. George Lewis may have been fortunate not to be discovered until his forties.

The market has also made possible the constant renewal of American music. There was always a way out of the cul de sac, sparing us the European fate of a dead form ruled by an academy. Just when one style was beginning to suffer from overexposure or die of tedium, something new and unexpected would appear. Well into the 1970s, one heard it through the grapevine, Marvin Gaye and others were producing some wonderful stuff in Motown. That, too, will live-on disc.

Listening for the Sound

WHAT'S happening now? Not much, I fear; a matter for concern if we regard the genius of American popular music as a proxy for the vitality of society as a whole. In particular there doesn't seem to be much from the black community, other than this hip-hopping. Maybe I'm missing something important, and I hope so. I twist the radio dial in search of some new burst of energy (and it would be easy to recognize, contrary to the easy assumption of bourgeois insensibility). Wynton Marsalis, a young trumpeter from New Orleans, was praised in a Time cover story. I bought a couple of his albums but what I heard was lugubrious cocktail-lounge noodling in the expressionless tone patented by Miles Davis.