THE JAZZ AGE BEGINS NOT WITH BANGING BUT WITH "WHISPERING"

TODAY’S GUEST POST IS BY ROGER KIMMEL SMITH of THE SYNCOPATED TIMES. (SEE COMPLETE BIO BELOW.)

One hundred years ago today … in the Victor recording studios in Camden, New Jersey, Paul Whiteman and His Ambassador Orchestra recorded an innocuous foxtrot called "Whispering." This crisp, well-rehearsed performance—featuring a delightful solo chorus on slide whistle—became one of the most popular gramophone discs of the early 1920s, selling at least 1.25 million copies over the next four or five years. The sheet music for John Schonberger's tune became a million-seller as well.

Listen to “Whispering” by clicking below.

Paul Whiteman was born in Denver, Colorado in 1890. His father was head of music education for that city's public schools. He was classically trained on violin and viola and played in symphony orchestras as a young man, but also enjoyed popular songs and the syncopated sounds of ragtime. After service in World War I, he formed a nine-piece dance band that played in California's swankiest hotels and became a favorite among the motion picture colony in Los Angeles. Accepting a lengthy residency at the newly-built Ambassador Hotel on the boardwalk at Atlantic City, Whiteman took his band east in 1920. As luck would have it, the National Association of Talking Machine Jobbers held its convention in Atlantic City that summer, and Whiteman was soon offered a Victor contract. [Editor’s note: click here for the numerous other NY1920 posts related to Victor Records.] "Whispering," with "The Japanese Sandman" on the B-side, was the band's first release, and the biggest of its many hits.

The record exemplifies the contemporary early-twenties sound of peppy, polite dance music played by hotel-based "society" bands. These groups hewed closely to formal orchestrations that sound antiquated to 21st-century ears, but Whiteman and his fellow bandleaders like Isham Jones, Ted Lewis, and Ben Selvin incorporated the "hot" syncopated styles that were gaining popularity and that were sometimes referred to, still somewhat vaguely, with the salacious term "jazz."

The features that would make jazz a distinctive musical idiom by 1923 were not yet recognized by the broad public in 1920, though the genre, and the word, were certainly beginning to make an impact, not just in African American circles. In New York, back in 1917, five pale musicians from New Orleans had made a small sensation when they played at Reisenweber's Cafe on Columbus Circle under the name The Original Dixieland Jass Band. They were regarded as a novelty act, an impression reaffirmed by their hit recording "Livery Stable Blues," in which they made barnyard groans on their instruments. The early image of jazz was of a raucous, uncultured sort of syncopated noise.

Whiteman keenly knew this stereotyped impression was inaccurate, and that syncopation need not be permanently associated with lowbrow forms of culture. His desire to, as he later put it, "make a lady out of jazz" essentially meant an aspiration to infuse hot rhythm and improvisation into the kind of dance music appropriate to be heard in hotel ballrooms, respectable parlors, and concert halls. He got good help from his pianist and principal arranger, Ferde Grofé, in adapting elements of the New Orleans style—heavy on improvisation, and usually played by small groups—into strict orchestrations for a larger ensemble.

The nickname by which Whiteman was often billed after 1924, "King of Jazz," was never remotely accurate—not even when Bix Beiderbecke was in his band—and over time it came to seem downright disturbing, hovering around his later career like an albatross and sinking his posthumous reputation. That this royal appellation, and such intense commercial success, accrued to a Caucasian bandleader (named White-man!) who made such genteel music, seemed to make him Exhibit A in the later debate over whose music jazz was and who deserved to profit off it. Nevertheless, the rotund maestro surely contributed to the diffusion of jazz in its early days and its integration into the mainstream of popular music.

"Whispering" was also a landmark event for the recording industry. Its runaway success ensured Whiteman pride of place in the catalogue of the country's leading record label, Victor, and thus helped cement the dominant dance-band style of the twenties. In his book Recorded Music in American Life, William Howard Kenney points out that being the top band at the top label meant Whiteman got his pick of tunes to record, lots of promotion, and other meaningful perks. Whiteman's commercial sound, with occasional dressed-up, so-called "symphonic" arrangements of pop tunes, suited the tastes of gramophone industry tastemakers who sought to foster, as Kenney phrases it, "a musical synthesis of jazz with late Victorian sentiment and propriety." Rightly or wrongly, this sound was ubiquitous as America entered what became known as the jazz age.

References/further reading:

Kenney, William Howard. Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. [NOTE: William Howard Kenney passed away July 26, 2020.]

Teachout, Terry. "King of the Jazz Age." Commentary, December 2003. 

Yanow, Scott. "Paul Whiteman: Profiles in Jazz." The Syncopated Times, January 22, 2020. 

WRITTEN BY ROGER KIMMEL SMITH, AUGUST 23, 2020

ROGER KIMMEL SMITH IS A FREELANCE WORDSMITH BASED IN ITHACA, NEW YORK. HE RECENTLY PUBLISHED THE ESSAY “1920: THE YEAR BROADWAY LEARNED TO SYNCOPATE” IN THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER THE SYNCOPATED TIMES. HE HOSTS A WEEKLY PROGRAM ON MUSIC AND POPULAR CULTURE OF THE 1920S AND 1930S, "CRAZY WORDS, CRAZY TUNE," ON WRFI COMMUNITY RADIO (FRIDAYS NOON TO 2PM EASTERN TIME, WWW.WRFI.ORG). WEBSITE: WWW.SMITHMEAWORD.COM.

TAGS:  jazz, popular music, Paul Whiteman, Victor Records, Atlantic City, recording industry