Jazz Magazines of the 1930s: An Overview of Their Provocative Journalism

Throughout its existence jazz has been attended by a great body of journalism, which, as a whole, contains more reportage and features on jazz artists than interpretive studies contributing to a comprehensive and effective aesthetic criticism. Yet there is a surprising regularity of analysis within magazines, newspapers, and periodicals, the distillation of which has produced a fascinating branch of American prose. Diffuse but descriptive commentaries in less than scholarly settings contribute to the exotic and fan-laden associations of jazz. These associations die hard in the face of a growing, genuine jazz scholarship in the United States and in Europe. The topic of jazz criticism--evaluations and analyses in formal essays, reviews of recorded and live performances, biographical and historical studies--particularly as it developed during the 1930s, deserves serious attention. This essay will focus on the contributions of American critics to the ways in which we think and write about jazz. Foreign-born commentators whose work appeared in American publications will be briefly cited, as will the foreign jazz press, an enormous and slightly older entity, which viewed jazz as an exotic phenomenon. Its writers operated without a vested interest in the cultural issues jazz raised for Americans. These included social and spiritual matters, how to define jazz and write about it, and the question of whether jazz was a uniquely national music. The jazz magazine became the forum for intense discussions generated by the music and the questions that surrounded it.