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We have an opening for TWO VERSATILE BANDS. Two high-grade Dance Orchestras ... wanted for the evening sessions. Jazz bands will not be considered.1
When the New York Clipper published this advertisement for the Roseland Ballroom on February 22, 1924, Fletcher Henderson and His Orchestra had already met the qualifications for the job they would begin in July: "versatile," "high-grade," and mostly nonjazz. Whatever the Roseland managers meant by "jazz" in 1924-probably a boisterous, undisciplined, and semi-improvised music they associated with the seedier cabarets-they must have been pleased to find that, to their ears at least, the Henderson band did not play it.
Historical accounts of Henderson's early band tend to disparage it for the same reason the Roseland management embraced it-for not playing jazz. Writing in the 1940s, the influential French critic Hugues Panassie found the band making "commercial concessions, especially at its debut when it attempted to be the `Paul Whiteman of the race.'"2 Gunther Schuller extended this line of criticism in the late 1960s when he wrote of the band's "erratic path, inevitably vacillating between opposing pulls, catering on the one hand to the tastes of their white dancing audience, trying on the other to deal with new musical problems in an original and honest way."3 Even after hiring Louis Armstrong in late 1924, Henderson continued to manifest this "problem," which in the view of most historians is only exacerbated by Armstrong's presence.4 That presence, indeed, has made it difficult to recapture the early 1920s as experienced by musicians and audiences of the time.
The binary perspective manifested in Panassie's and Schuller's critiques has a long history in jazz criticism, but it should have no place in efforts to understand the musical activities of the early Henderson band, as historians have begun to recognizes.5 Coming to terms with this music calls for looking beyond the traditional dichotomies of jazz criticism: between "true and false jazz" as Panassie so baldly put it,6 between "hot" and "commercial" jazz,7 and between "black" jazz, "the primitive art of Negroid improvisation,"8 with its associations of "natural," "vibrant, spirited playing," and "white" jazz, which usually connotes "clean" and "carefully rehearsed" commercial arrangements.9
Taken together, these writings have constructed a clear message linking race, musical style, and commercial inclination:...