A decade after editing The New Negro anthology of Harlem Renaissance writers, Alain Locke published a volume on The Negro and His Music, which included the most substantial treatment of jazz by a black writer to date, touching upon the historical, musicological and sociological aspects of the music. In presenting a chronology of the development of black music in the US, he reveals a history largely unknown to the white authors of early books on jazz—from plantation songs performed at the behest of slave owners, to sorrow songs (spirituals) and secular folk songs (blues and work songs), from minstrelsy to ragtime to jazz. In the spirit of articulating the cultural contributions that Negroes have made to American civilization (one of the functions of the New Negro), Locke makes the point that it was inevitable for the Negro to become the principal source of America’s popular music, given the ‘weak musical heritage’ of the dominant Anglo-Saxon stock. (No Anglo-Saxon rebuttal was forthcoming.)

Black music achieved its own direction and development only in the 1890s. While Negro folk songs contained the unique expressions of Negro emotion, folk-wit and musical inventiveness, writes Locke, Negro musicians had to overcome the caricatures perpetuated by minstrelsy. Nevertheless, they built upon elements of rhythm and swing in the ‘coon songs’ to compose ‘raggin’ tunes’ for Negro cabarets in Memphis and St. Louis, and Negro music began to distinguish itself with its own peculiar idioms of harmony, instrumentation and technique. In Locke’s telling, jazz arrived with the 1912 “Concert of Negro Music” at Carnegie Hall, featuring James Reese Europe and his Clef Club Orchestra.

From a musicological perspective, jazz early in the 20th c. was both evolutionary and revolutionary, writes Locke. In terms of evolution,

…The jubilant spiritual camp-meeting shout contained the ecstasy and rhythms that characterized ragtime and blues, out of which developed jazz in the improvised breaks between choruses…the free style introduced by Negro musicians has generations of experience behind it in the voice tricks and vocal habits of Negro choral singing…out of the vocal slur and quaver between the flat and the natural came the whole jazz cadenza…

The revolutionary aspects of jazz, on the other hand, were technical: the agility of the music, the variability of tone over a broader range, the odd intervals, the variety of instrumental combinations and their myriad effects.

Already in the early-1930s, Locke sees jazz reflecting and complicating the perennial problems of race, modernism, and commercialization. In spite of its racial origin, jazz had become ‘one great interracial collaboration, in which the important matter is the artistic quality of the product and not the color of the artists.’ The ‘common enemy,’ he says, is ‘the ever-present danger of commercialization.’ Having left behind ‘its humble sources in the delta, the levee, the Memphis dive and barrel-house saloon,’ jazz was embraced as a symbol of hectic times, ‘an escape from the tensions and monotonies of a machine-ridden, extroverted form of civilization.’ After a Golden Age between 1922 and 1928, though, says Locke, jazz has become artificial and decadent. The vogue for sentimental song and dance has ‘spawned a plague, profitable but profligate, that has done more moral harm than artistic good.’ A cult of primitivism built up around jazz and warped the autochthonous emotional elements into a popular craze, and this ersatz concoction (‘public taste is a notoriously poor judge of quality’) spoiled the ‘organic trinity’ of rhythm, harmony and creative improvisation that made jazz unique. The Negro, finding his way into the mainstream of the culture at last, has both gained and lost.

The Negro, strictly speaking, never had a jazz age; he was born that way, as far as the original jazz response went. But as a modern and particularly as an American also, he became subject to the infections, spiritual and moral, of the jazz age. The erotic side of jazz, in terms of which it is often condemned, is admittedly there. But there is a vast difference between its first healthy and earthy expression in the original peasant paganism out of which it arose and its hectic, artificial and sometimes morally vicious counterpart which was the outcome of the vogue of artificial and commercialized jazz entertainment. The one is primitively erotic; the other, decadently neurotic.

Ten years after he promoted the New Negro, Locke sounds pessimistic about the future of black music. He shares with the ‘hot jazz’ aficionados a lament for the passing of a Golden Age, but his concerns emanate from an understanding of the music’s deep roots in the black American experience. For Locke, the decadence in jazz was a psychological blow to the Negro. If he had seen the future, he would have been reassured: black music in general, and jazz in particular, was nowhere near exhaustion. Benny Goodman probably wasn’t going to make him feel any better, but maybe Thelonious Monk would.