Alexander's Ragtime Band

I recently read an interesting book by Elijah Wald (another wonderful name) called How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll.

Wald's thesis, in my words not his, might be summed up this way:

The big problem with most histories of pop music is that they are written by male losers who either sat in their bedrooms practicing playing guitar ten hours a day or accumulated huge collections of recorded music because they had a lot of free time on account of how girls would never talk to them, and usually for very good reasons. These guys not only had a very poor understanding of how the people who were not losers understood music—that is as background for relating to the opposite sex, most notably through dancing—they actually resented the non-losers who were most influential here because they were the very women who would have nothing to do with the aforementioned losers.

And so you can read a lot of books by ragtime purists, jazz purists, blues purists, R&B purists and Rock and Roll purists that all seek to diminish the pop music that was actually, you know, most popular at the expense of stuff that, in the view of the basement-dwelling social misfits, "really should have mattered". As Wald puts it, Popular music history was actually written by the losers not the winners.

Wald mentions Irving Berlin's brilliant Alexander's Ragtime Band and how it has been treated by critics but he does not make as much of it as he might have. And he does so for reasons that make perfect sense for him, he is telling the story of how pop music became rock and roll.

I'd like to dwell on a couple. as Wald notes, there are two lines of criticism directed at this song. The first is that it's "fake ragtime" and that it has only one phrase with syncopation. The second is that Berlin in fact swiped the melody from the greatest ragtime composer of them all, Scott Joplin. Wald does not note, that the two directly contradict one another.

Imagine I produce a painting and claim it's mine and critics say, it's a lousy painting and besides you didn't actually do that painting, it's really a Michelangelo. Well, you can see the problem: it can't be crap and really a Michelangelo at the same time. The real problem, of course, is that Berlin got famous and lots of other people did not get quite so famous.

Criteria
But Wald makes another point, and makes it over and over again through his book, and it is that the really interesting thing about these judgments is the criteria used to arrive at them. If you're a ragtime purist it's going to bother you a whole lot that Alexanders Ragtime Band is not ragtime. And that is a perfectly legitimate application of one set of criteria. But, for the rest of us, who aren't ragtime purists, who cares? Does it bother anyone that the Dire Straits song "The Sultans of Swing" is not itself a swing tune? In both cases the song is about a band not an example of the music the band played.

But if we come at the song with a different set of criteria we can see something else about it. For classic ragtime is a rather repetitive trick if you think about it. It uses a steady ground rhythm, usually march time, against which a couple of melody notes are played off of where you'd expect them to land, thus the syncopation or "ragged" time. And classic ragtime does this all the time to the point that it can get quite boring.

Seen from that perspective, what Berlin does here is quite clever. He slips the syncopation into just a few bars as variety. He has given the music depth and sophistication that it never had in most ragtime songs (ragtime was getting quite long in the tooth when Berlin wrote Alexander). He opened up the door for a whole new set of possibilities.

It is not true, as some have claimed, that this makes Berlin the real father of the jazz song, but he is the father of something and that is a strain of sophisticated jazz that runs from him, through Gershwin, Carmichael, Ellington, Arlen,  through Riddle, Jenkins, Nat King Cole, Sinatra, Mel Torme, Sinatra and others. And that is nothing to sneeze at.