MUSICAL CHRONICLE
JAZZ is a series of jerks. In rhythm, you do not have to be conscious of the one two, one two; or of the one two three, one two three. Not even in Mendelssohn. But in jazz, to get your pleasure, you have to count the beat. Because jazz is every old thing which has ever been, distorted. Anticipated a little; suspended a little. It is the most banal with tobasco sauce; beans with ketchup plentifully. Ten minutes of it used as entertainment, makes a bore. For dance music, it cannot compare with Viennese waltzes. You do not even have to go to Johann Strauss. Waldteufel, flat as he is.
But some people in Paris talk of the rhythms of jazz. Three times in a century, to gratify some vaguest longing—people in Paris have dreamed fantasies, and called them by the name of America. First, nostalgic Chateaubriand and the Natchez. The Apollo in the hide of the "peau rouge." Second, Baudelaire and the great pale American Christ. The great pallid American Christ wandering the streets of New York was Edgar Allan Poe. Third, certain fatigued contemporaries who, more or less because Marinetti stood on the prow of a dreadnaught in a Byronic frame of mind, mistake material brutishly used in America for primitive art. A steel-construction with Antwerp plastered over its flanks is architecture. "The Parthenon was built for use." The Parthenon, with the plumb of its columns subtly varied that the eye may be enchanted! Then, Charlot, Fattie, and Mees Pearrrl White. The Saturday Evening insensibility as the American story. And jazz. The rhythms of jazz.
One wonders: have any of these charming dreamers ever seen or heard the objects they mistake for beauty, or clarity, or significance? They have seen Charlot. And, no doubt, his films are much funnier than the shows in Paris, though you do see some very funny ones at the Théâtre Nationale de l'Opéra, and at the Maison de Molière. But what is it they have really seen and heard? Some people opened a little place off the Place de la Madeleine, and Cocteau, who had made quite a success with the pieces of the battery in the performance of Milhaud's Choephores, insisted on play-
