This article was downloaded by: [Swarthmore College] On: 05 December 2014, At: 13:44 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of Musicological Research Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gmur20 Jazz Exotica and the Naked City Phil Ford a a Indiana University Jacobs School of Music , Published online: 28 Apr 2008. To cite this article: Phil Ford (2008) Jazz Exotica and the Naked City, Journal of Musicological Research, 27:2, 113-133, DOI: 10.1080/01411890801989596 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01411890801989596 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014 Journal of Musicological Research, 27: 113–133, 2008 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN 0141-1896 print / 1547-7304 online DOI: 10.1080/01411890801989596 GMUR0141-18961547-7304Journal of Musicological Research,Research Vol. 27, No. 2, March 2008: pp. 1–25 JAZZ EXOTICA AND THE NAKED CITY JazzPhil FordExotica and the Naked City Phil Ford Indiana University Jacobs School of Music Noir fictions tend to a binary form of representation in which society is shown divided into light and dark sides, with the latter casting its shadows onto the former. Key to this discussion is Irving Howe’s notion of the city as a narrative device for representing society in all its contradic- tions and fractures. In film noir, the abstract notion of “society” is trans- formed into a concrete spatial schema: the Naked City, a ground where dispossessed groups congregate and interact with “straight” society. The city becomes a locus for (and geographic metaphor of) the idea of a fallen world hidden just behind the façade of bland social harmony. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the music written for films that explore this trope of representation was often a cinematic version of jazz. More exactly, it is music that attempts to conjure filmic images of the urban demimonde associated with jazz and the narrative subject that traverses it. In its traffic in filmic image, cinematic jazz resembles exotica, a kind of pop music that deploys a code of standardized musical gestures to evoke imaginary exotic paradises. But jazz exotica replaces jungle settings with images of the “Naked City,” which narrate motion across the borders separating the light and dark sides of film noir’s divided America. It was a very nice jail. It was on the twelfth floor of the new city hall. It was a very nice city hall. Bay City was a very nice place. People lived Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014 there and thought so. If I lived there, I would probably think so. I would see the nice blue bay and the cliffs and the yacht harbor and the quiet streets of houses, old houses brooding under old trees and new houses with sharp green lawns and wire fences and staked saplings set into the parkway in front of them. I knew a girl who lived on Twenty- Fifth Street. It was a nice street. She was a nice girl. She liked Bay City. She wouldn’t think about the Mexican and Negro slums stretched out on the dismal flats south of the old interurban tracks. Nor of the waterfront dives along the flat shore south of the cliffs, the sweaty little dance halls on the pike, the marihuana joints, the narrow fox faces 114 Phil Ford watching over the tops of newspapers in far too quiet hotel lobbies, nor the pickpockets and grifters and con men and drunk rollers and pimps and queens on the board walk.1 In this passage from Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake, Philip Marlowe has been arrested by a pair of brutal, corrupt cops who are trying to intimidate him into abandoning a case. The sing-song cadence of the first paragraph, with its series of simple short sentences and its keening repetition of the word “nice,” is a mocking evocation of a children’s book’s innocent perspective. It is brutally undercut in the next paragraph, with its hard-boiled patter of underworld slang and its inventory of criminal types. Chandler’s stylistic opposition reaches toward something like a social critique; literary texture mirrors the basic distinction in Marlowe’s world, between the realm of the “nice” and its opposite, all that is not-nice.2 Nice society is represented by the nice part of town, with its nice jail, nice blue bay, and the nice girl who lives on a nice street. Not-nice society gathers on the other side of town, and it comprises alienated beings living at the margins of society—African Americans and Mexicans, detectives and criminals, hustlers, hipsters, homosexuals, washed-up boxers, and show-business bottom-feeders. This side of the nice/not-nice binary divide might simply be called noir. This article deals with noir, a term that has variously been taken to refer to a style, a mood, a genre, a cycle of works, a genealogy, and a mode of gender discourse.3 Whatever noir really means has yet to be resolved and probably cannot be resolved, at least on the simple level of semantic defi- nition. I will talk only about one limited aspect of noir: its schema of a society divided into its light and dark sides, and the literary images gener- ated by that schema—of violence behind a placid facade, wickedness behind the pretense of virtue, madness behind the mask of rationality. 1Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1943), 144. 2This is not by any means the only time Chandler used this imagery. “The Simple Art of Murder,” Chandler’s essay on the aesthetics of the detective story, concludes with an extended Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 13:44 05 December 2014 and poetic elaboration of this schema of social relations. Chandler, “The Simple Art Of Murder,” in The Chandler Collection, vol. 3 (London: Picador, 1983), 191. 3For a summary of the divergent perspectives of noir that have emerged in the past fifty years, see James Naremore, “The History of an Idea,” in More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 9–39. Naremore argues—rightly, I think— that noir, like many period and style designations, cannot be defined in terms of a semantic inter- pretation that holds that the word refers to a unitary, definable thing. Rather, he argues that the word can be used to denote a branching system of associations between related concepts. The looseness of some of these associations, and the inability of any one perspective to account for them all, is a function of their history. History introduces the unpredictable, contingent variations that accrete to any living tradition of image or expression. This view is summed up in an epigram Naremore borrows from Nietzsche: Only that which has no history is definable. Jazz Exotica and the Naked City 115 The two sides of noir’s social imagination are opposite, but complemen- tary. The noir is in dialectical opposition to the nice, something that not only lies contrary to it but whose continued existence pervades and colors it. The noir exists because of the nice, not in spite of it. Nice society is erected on a foundation of taboo. Its citizens are forbidden certain pleasures, which are provided by those who are cast out of nice society, and in so doing become ever more untouchable. Cowboy, the heroin dealer in Jack Gelber’s 1959 play The Connection, understands his trade in these terms: “I believe that anything that’s illegal is illegal because it makes more money for more people that way.” 4 Noir representations are above all about exposing the contradictions between the sun-dappled façade of the official social order and the shadowed underworld it conceals but can never entirely suppress. Noir relies on the irony that arises from perceiving these two sides as part of an integrated whole, their rifts exposed and unhealed. In literature, film, and music, this rather abstract idea has been persis- tently embodied in the city: Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny, Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, David Lynch’s Lumberton, William S. Burroughs’s Interzone, and so on. It should be clear even from this short list that this representational trope, while dominant in noir, is not exclusive to it.
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