the saxophone. The shakes, trills, vibratos, smears, and slides come natural to him, although they produce tones outside the scale, because he has never been tutored into a feeling for perfect tones, as white men have; and he uses these with a great joy in the surprise they give, in the way they adorn or destroy a melody; he is given also to letting instruments follow their own bent, because he has a faultless sense of rhythm and he always comes out right in the end. But this is only the beginning of the jazz band—for its perfection we go afield.
We go farther than Ted Lewis. M Darius Milhaud has told me that the jazz band at the Hotel Brunswick in Boston is one of the best he heard in America, and stranger things have happened. The best of the negro bands (although he is dead I make exception for that superb 369th Hell-fighters U. S. Infantry Band as it was conducted by the lamented Jim Europe) are probably in the neighbourhood of 140th Street and Lenox Avenue in New York and in the negro district of Chicago. Many hotels and night clubs in New York have good jazz bands; I limit myself to three which are representative, and, by their frequent appearances in vaudeville, are familiar. Ted Lewis is one of the three; Vincent Lopez and Paul Whiteman are the others. Lewis does with notorious success something that had as well not be done at all. He is totally, but brilliantly, wrong in the use of his materials, for he is trying to do what he cannot do, i. e., make a negro jazz orchestra. It is a good band; like Europe's it omits strings; it is quite the noisiest of the orchestras, as that of Lopez is the quietest, and Lewis uses its (and his) talents for the perpetration of a series of musical travesties, jokes, puns, and games which are extraordinarily tedious and would be hissed off the stage if it were not for the actual skill Lewis has in effecting amusing orchestral combinations. His own violence, his exaggeration of the temperamental conductor, his nasal voice and lean figure in excessively odd black clothes, his pontificating over the orchestra, his announcement that he is going to murder music—all indicate a lack of appreciation of the medium. He may be a good vaudeville stunt, but he is not a great jazz leader.
Lewis may have a perfectly trained orchestra, but the sense of control which one absolutely requires, he does not give. He has violence, not energy, and he cannot interpret those qualities which Mr Haviland so justly discovers as being of our contemporary life
