Ru
EnF. Shak
A jazz study by W. Sargeant in historical prospect
In 1938, the release of the important work “Jazz: Hot and Hybrid”, written by musicologist and journalist W. Sargeant, took place. The author of the article focuses on the bias of many authors who wrote about jazz, whose works were kept in deliberately apologetic tones. Sargent’s book was favorably distinguished from many stereotypical opuses devoted to the history of jazz by its open-mindedness and judicious analysis of the phenomenon under study. It was a statement made by an academic musician who had been playing in representative symphony orchestras for a long time. For these reasons, T. Adorno, an irreconcilable antagonist of jazz and music of mass genres, chose Sargent’s work as an authoritative source of quotations for his works. Despite the fact that Sargent’s research declared the idea of the paramount importance of a musicological approach to jazz, his work contained some sketchy sketches related to sociological analysis. Discussing the existence of jazz, the author often used the term “standardization”, describing the inclusion of jazz in strictly regulated standards for the production of commercial music based on stereotypical elements of the composition structure and commercialization of the material. The article shows that in 1940 Adorno borrowed the term “standardization” from Sargent’s works. He systematically appears in numerous essays on popular music. Of undoubted historical interest is the release of the Soviet translation of Sargent’s work. The author of the article has at his disposal one of the typewritten originals of the translation, according to which the text was edited. Having studied the personal archives of the Russian jazz researcher and theorist E. Ovchinnikov, the author of the article managed to discover a number of historical details related to the preparation of the Russian-language version of the publication.
Key words
W. Sargeant, T. W. Adorno, E. Ovchinnikov, jazz critique, standardization in mass music, history of jazz, translations of jazz literature in the Soviet Union.
For citation
Shak F. A jazz study by W. Sargeant in historical prospect. In: South-Russian Musical Anthology. 2024. No. 3. Pp. 95–101.
