Kinds of Blue: Toni Morrison, Hans Janowitz, and the Jazz Aesthetic

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Jurgen E. Grandt

Cutting to the Chase: Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray, Morrisonian Cracks and Ellingtonian Breaks

The jam session is, as Ralph Ellison called it, "the jazzman's true academy" (245). In an art form that for the first half-century of its existence knew no formal schooling and was not represented in academia, informal gatherings of musicians improvising with each other free from the demands of producers, agents, promoters, and club owners provided both the training ground and the experimental laboratory for jazz musicians. The cutting contest is a particularly competitive variety of this jazz tradition and arose out of early New Orleans jazz. In the first decade of the twentieth century, there were roughly thirty bands active in the Crescent City, and as a form of advertising, bands would routinely ride through the streets of Storyville on horse-drawn wagons promoting various events and products. When a chance meeting between two rival orchestras occurred, quite often a so-called "bucking contest" would ensue: The wagons were tied together by a rope to prevent escape, and each band would try to outplay the other in a contest of skill endurance, and, in these early days, volume. Later, in the heyday of the swing era, the so-called battle of the bands pitted two orchestras against each other in a similar fashion; the victory of Chick Webb's orchestra over the "King of Swing," Bennie Goodman, at the Savoy Ballroom in 1936 is perhaps the most famous such battle (Bechet 63-68; Behrendt 22-24; "Cutting Contest"; Polillo 72-73, 127-28, 146-48). Unlike a bucking contest or a battle of the bands, a cutting contest is waged between individual musicians. In a cutting contest, two or more soloists alternately improvise on the same tune with the ultimate goal of "cutting" or outplaying the opponent by countering, subverting, expanding, and ultimately topping the opponent's musical ideas. Solo space is allotted in accordance with the success or failure of the improviser as adjudicated on the spot by both the musicians on the bandstand and the listeners in the audience. Often, the competition pits two musicians who play the same instrument against each other, according one chorus to each player at the beginning before steadily decreasing solo space to four measures each (hence the term "trading fours"), occasionally even two or one. The cutting contest thus constitutes the musical variety of African American oral traditions like signifying, playing the dozens, or other call-and-response patterns (DeVeaux 210-12; Townsend 5660).

While the informal jam session had always been a vital ritual in musicians' circles, the cutting contest began to acquire even more significance with the demise of the swing big bands starting in the late 1930s. As job opportunities in larger orchestras steadily decreased, jazz musicians were forced to compete for jobs in small combos or found their own band. Thus, although cutting contests were mostly held in a congenial atmosphere, their purpose was to establish and maintain a hierarchy of professional ability and competence. As such, they constituted not only the breeding ground of what would become the bebop revolution, but they also carried potentially wide-ranging economic implications for all involved: Newcomers just might land a gig with a big name in the business, or even secure a recording contract, if they managed to "cut" their opponents, whereas arrived players had to protect their reputations as well as their market value and, if possible, enhance it by cutting particularly tenacious upstarts or well-established rivals (DeVeaux 208-10). On this "musical dueling ground," Ellison, himself a trumpeter, noted that "even the greatest can never rest on past accomplishments, for, as with the fast guns of the Old West, there is always someone waiting in a jam session to blow him literally, not only down, but into shame and discouragement" (246). Trombonist Dicky Wells remembers some of the cutting contests at the countless basement clubs in Harlem in the early 1940s: