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The "Charleston," of 1923, stands for an era -- the Roaring Twenties -- but it is as fresh as ever. James P. Johnson, who wrote the music, is known as the "Father of Stride Piano." His "Carolina Shout" of 1921 has been called the first recorded jazz piano solo. It seems to have had a big effect on other musicians, including Duke Ellington who, as a young man, learned to play it from the piano roll. And his famous "Charleston" rhythm also affected composers, including George Gershwin in his Concerto in F.

James P. Johnson

I love what we studied in a recent semester of the Opposites in Music class at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation -- including about jazz, through Eli Siegel's beautiful poem "Hymn to Jazz and the Like." In these classes, the most avant-garde study of jazz I know of, the teachers looked at the poem and Mr. Siegel's note on it in his book Hail, American Development, and gave examples, ranging from Fletcher Henderson's Stampede to the spiritual Go Down Moses to the Beatles' I Feel Fine and even Chopin's Revolutionary Etude. We had a wonderful time learning about the history and evolution of jazz, its relation to other types of music, and its meaning for our lives as Aesthetic Realism understands it. All good music, we have learned, shows that the world can be liked on an honest basis because it is the oneness of opposites. This is education about music at its most technical; in the sheer joy of listening to great music and really hearing it; and in every class we know the world and ourselves better.

In Hymn to Jazz and the Like, Mr. Siegel has these lines:

Sound is looking for new illustrations showing spathe might, glory, findingness and abandon of spaman.
Yah, and Oh, Lord, there was the St. Louis spaBlues.
Sounds were made to fall into different places in spathis.
Notes behaved otherwise.
Something in you expected a note here, and it spawas there.
Something in you expected a note to be this way spaand it was that.
Ha, what Jazz does to the this and that of notes, spathe isness and wasness and might-be-ness of spachords.

That is the "Charleston"! "Something in you expected a note here, and it was there." What it does with the expected and unexpected!

Right from the first measure you can hear those opposites
expected and the unexpected -- in the notes and the rhythms. The first chord is the tonic, a warm Bb major, and it comes, as you would expect, on the downbeat. So far it's regular -- no surprises! But it is marked piano forte, soft loud, and because of that it seems both to hug you and give you a little push. Then, suddenly there is silence -- an 8th note rest -- which hits you as hard as the sound had, and you are delightfully suspended for a moment. Then, in comes the band when you least expect and bumps you again on that same sweet tonic chord, as if it's getting in another jolt for good measure. And that jolting rhythm is throughout the melody. Those jolts get you on the weakest part of the measure -- the second half of the second beat -- and you don't know where you are, but you don't mind it one bit!

James P. Johnson

Looking at that first measure: it has, as you heard, two strong chords. Each is accented; each has weight. But Johnson has given them an ever-so-subtle difference in length, which makes us feel that within that solid structure there is something awry, charmingly off-balance. Imagine what would happen if these chords were all equal in length. It is, literally, "square!" What a difference, how much more life, the original has.

And along with that jazzy rhythm, the melody, too, puts together order and wildness, what you expect and what you don't. That melody seems, at first, so conservative. The second measure rises up only one small chromatic step: to an F#; and that modest motion continues, as the third measure again rises only a semitone -- to a G. Very proper. But -- what is the composer doing underneath? All kinds of surprising chord shifts are happening -- with darknesses and brightnesses, discord and sweetness, closing in and opening up (just like our knees do in the dance)!

In Aesthetic Realism consultations I have studied the meaning of this great principle by Eli Siegel: "The resolution of conflict in self is like the making one of opposites in art." Before I met Aesthetic Realism, I was mixed up about how I was orderly and wild. I felt I had to arrange myself very carefully, and there was a stiffness in my manner. I prided myself on being meticulous with my things; and if anyone moved something in my apartment without my permission, I got vexed. Meanwhile, inwardly I also saw myself as unconventional, a "free spirit," and would sometimes defiantly stay out all night partying, and drive at reckless speeds. I felt like two different people--and couldn't make sense of it.

In one of my first Aesthetic Realism consultations, I was asked questions about how I saw the whole world -- and also in relation to the art I love, acting. I began to learn that what was interfering with my happiness and expression was that, without wholly knowing it, I felt the world was too messy, and I was disdainful of many things, and exclusive. "Do you think," my consultants asked, "that you have an excessive desire for reality to be neat?" I said yes, but I didn't understand why. They continued:

"Do you think there can be a desire for outward arrangement because one has inward anarchy?"

"Yes!" I said.

Consultants. Do you think that is a disadvantage as an actress or an advantage?

I said I thought it was an advantage, because in acting every detail is important. They explained:

"Yes, the details are important, but do you think that at a certain time an actress has to let go?"

Ann Richards. Oh, yes!

Consultants. "And if she just wants to be neat she's not going to be able to let go? Do you think that acting like all the other arts happens to be a oneness of structure and wildness? Of freedom and order?"

Ann Richards. Yes, I do!

I was so relieved and thrilled hearing this; I was learning what only Aesthetic Realism shows, that contempt -- the "desire to get a false importance or glory" from the lessening of what is not oneself, is what was hurting my life. I have seen -- and this music shows it --that when your purpose is to be fair to the world, you will be both careful, accurate--and at the same time so free, untrammelled, and able truly to let go!

The "Charleston" is a jubilant celebration--a oneness of tidy order and utter freedom. I think this is why its rhythm, and the dance based on it, swept America and Europe -- and why people today still love it; it meets that great need in us, to feel that when we are at our wildest, we are also at our most respectful! And it stands for what I want in my life, my art, and my marriage to the man I love, Christopher Balchin.

Eli Siegel took jazz seriously very early, and saw it as art when it wasn't seen that way, in the early 1920's. In his note to "Hymn to Jazz and the Like," he writes:

Jazz is a new junction of the deep and the lightsome, the permanent and the unexpected, the continuous and the surprising.

People in the 1920's dancing the "Charleston" wanted to feel deep and lightsome; securely themselves while welcoming the surprising. The way you use your body in dancing it is dramatic; it puts together those beginning opposites Mr. Siegel speaks about in his book Self and World --the here and there, the snug and exterior, which we're all trying to do a good job with.  

 

You stay essentially in the same place on the dance floor, and yet, as you swing your arms and legs, and slide your knees in and out, it's one of the liveliest, most out-of-yourself things ever!

James P. Johnson came to a new, wonderful sound early in the 20th century -- and now and in the centuries to come all people can learn from Aesthetic Realism what music can teach us about the biggest hopes of our lives.