That is to say, Gershwin is capable of everything, from Swanee to A Stairway to Paradise. His sentiment is gentler than Berlin's, his "attack" more delicate. Delicacy, even dreaminess, is a quality he alone brings into jazz music. And his sense of variation in rhythm, of an oddly placed accent, of emphasis and colour, is impeccable. He isn't of the stage, yet, so he lacks Berlin's occasional bright hardness; he never has Berlin's smartness; and he seems possessed of an insatiable interest and curiosity. I feel I can bank on him. Banking on Porter is dangerous because essentially he is much more sophisticated in general attitude of mind than any of the others, and although he has written ragtime and patter-songs and jazz of exceptional goodness, he has one quality which may bar him for ever from the highest place—I mean that he is essentially a parodist. I know of no one else with such a sense of musical styles. A blues, a 1910 rag, a Savoy operetta serio-comic love song, a Mother song—he writes them all with a perfect feeling for their musical nature, and almost always with satiric intention, with a touch of parody. It is only the most sophisticated form which is germane to him; in highly complex jazzing he is so much at home, his curiosity is so engaged, he feels the problem so much, that the element of parody diminishes. Yet The Blue Boy Blues, almost as intricate a thing as Berlin ever wrote, with a melody overlaid on a running syncopated comment, has a slight touch of parody in the very excess of its skill. Jazz has always mocked itself a little; it is possible that it will divide and follow two strains—the negro and the intellectual. In the second case Porter will be one of its leaders and Whiteman will be his orchestra. The song Soon, for example, is a deliberate annihilation of the southern negro sentiment carefully done by playing Harlem jazz, with a Harlem theme, mercilessly burlesquing the clichés of the Southern song—the Swanee-Mammy element—in favour of a Harlem alley. Porter's parody is almost too facile; Soon is an exasperatingly good piece of jazz in itself. He is a tireless experimenter, and the fact that in 1923 others are doing things he tried in 1919, makes me wonder whether his excessive intelligence and sophistication may not be pointing a way which steadier and essentially more native jazz writers will presently follow. Native, I mean, to jazz; taking it more seriously.
The other way is still open—the way of Sissle and Blake, of Creamer and Layton, of A. Harrington Gibbs. The last is a name
