In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

JAZZ 121
Tunney, who is famous for bragging of his high-brow tastes: "After an
evening meal ... he retired to his room and his literature" (New York
Times, September 23). Jazz is perhaps the only cultural form that combines
the attributes of sophisticated taste and raw physical force. But can
one really trust Dempsey's declaration of love for jazz if he admits, at the
same time, that he occasionally replaces jazz with waltzes?
Whatever the truth may be, the white heavyweight champion of the
world is not the only public figure to overstate his fondness for jazz,
which is now generally perceived as an expression of African-American
culture (Fordham, 20). Many writers-especially in Europe-would
rather publicly state a preference for Jack Dempsey's taste than for Gene
Tunney's. The hero of Bertolt Brecht's "Eine kleine Versicherungsgeschichte"
("A Little Insurance Story") finds that listening to jazz,
together with consuming hard liquor and coffee and attending metropolitan
revues, is a way of raising his energy level [see Bars, Revues]: "He
had whipped up his flagging vitality with all kinds of jazz" (Brecht, 170).
The poet Johannes Becher takes this motif of the connection between
music and bodily energy one step further when, in a text on prostitutes
("Dirnen"), he describes gypsy music and jazz as setting different
rhythms for sexual intercourse:
Flesh
kneading ourselves into meat: us,
embracing, we were melting into each other,
pasty ... spraying
sounds: gypsy violins! And hacking joints
a bony whirlpool: the jazz-band.
(Becher, p. 75)
Physically fulfilling sex is sex that has been "whipped up" by the pace
of other cultures, and while gypsy rhythms are associated with lubricity
("spraying sounds"), jazz suggests destruction ("hacking joints").
Although jazz as concept and metaphor invariably evokes scenes in
which the human body is coupled to strong rhythms [see Assembly Lines,
Dancing, Employees], it certainly does not belong to that series of cultural
forms which regularly turn surface against depth, and sheer movement
against expression. [see Authenticity vs. Artificiality, Gomina,
Movie Palaces] White intellectuals wish to find in jazz the essence of an