and so on. A similar effect with other means occurs in the treatment of three notes in Ingenue Baby, by George Gershwin, where the same note falls under a different beat with a delightful sense of surprise and uncertainty. Mr Hooker's words are equally tricky for it isn't "Beautiful-Ingenue-Baby" at all; it is Beautiful Ingenue (baby). In By and By, Gershwin has shifted an accent from the first to the second simply by giving the second the time-value usually given to the first, producing a fresh and delightful treatment of a sentimental expression. The variety of method is vastly interesting. Louis Hirsch, whom I rank fairly low as a composer for jazz, has done perfectly one obvious, necessary thing: stopped syncopating in the middle of a piece of ragtime. In the phrase "shake and shimmy everywhere" in It's Getting Very Dark on Old Broadway, he presents the whole-tone scale descending in two bars of full unsyncopated quarter-notes. In the works of Zez Confrey (they are issued with a snobbish tasty cover, rather like the works of Claude Debussy) the syncopation and the exploitation of concur- rent, apparently irreconcilable rhythms is first exasperating and eventually exciting. They are specifically piano pieces and require a brilliant proficiency to render them.
It is a little difficult, unless one has the piano score, to determine what part is the work of the composer, what of the jazz orchestra. You can only be fairly certain that whatever melody occurs is the composer's and that rhythmically he is followed with some fidelity. All you need to do is to listen to the violin, piano, or whatever instrument it is which holds the beat, to realize what the composer has given. Harmonization is often and orchestration nearly always left to other hands. Mr Berlin makes a habit now of giving credit to his chief collaborator; and he deserves it.[1]
II
Mr Berlin's masterpieces (June, 1923, but who shall say?) in Jazz are Everybody Step and Pack Up Your Sins. I see no letting down of his energy, none in his inventiveness. He is, oddly, one of
- ↑ It has been clairvoyantly pointed out to me by another composer that Berlin's pre-eminence in ragtime and jazz may be traced to his solitary devotion to melody and rhythm; in the jazz sense there remains something always pure in his work. This supports the suggestion made in the next paragraph.
