JAZZBO.

The audience had grown restless, and some people were heading for the exits--the twenty-second piece on the program was about to start--when the clarinet let out an uncorked whoop that riveted everyone in place before its wildly rising cry began to tumble, unmistakably laughing, back down the scale. Nothing like it had been heard before. The tipsy clarinet had hardly been steadied by a burst of brass when a rushing piano part swept the music off to a realm somewhere between Rachmaninoff and ragtime. There was a swoony foxtrot, and a finale that seemed to leave the stage spinning as the audience roared for more. The conductor took several curtain calls that snowy afternoon, February 12, 1924, along with the slender young pianist: Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin, elegant in spats and starched shirts, were bringing jazz to New York's respectable Aeolian Hall. The concert was repeated twice in the next few months (once in the even more rarefied precincts of Carnegie Hall), and the showstopper, Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," was recorded in June--as it has been dozens of times, of course, since then. Still, that performance was unique. Whiteman had put the concert together quickly, to beat out competition--"symphonic jazz" was a movement whose time had come--and Gershwin composed his contribution in about three weeks. There hadn't been time to finish: an arranger in the band had orchestrated the score, but on the scheduled day a page for piano solo was still entirely blank, and the composer, at the keyboard, simply improvised. The written direction for the orchestra's entrance in the big bluesy theme read "Wait for nod."

Gershwin, aged twenty-five and the author of various song hits, from "Swanee" to "Tee-Oodle-Um-Bum-Bo," was suddenly a serious composer and the most famous "jazzbo" in the country--a combination that made him a figure of intensely focussed expectation. Since the end of the war, Americans had been searching for a homegrown music to reflect the jittery new national rhythms, but the alternatives seemed bleak: the operettas of Sigmund Romberg and Rudolf Friml still flourishing on Broadway were old European hat, the shrieks and toots of "modern" composers like Edgard Varese were unfathomable, and jazz was widely understood to bear some relation to blacks and bordellos which would make the nation's fair-haired children run riot. The announced purpose of the Aeolian Hall concert was to resolve the pressing question "What is American music?" A gold-plated jury had been appointed--including Rachmaninoff himself, Jascha Heifetz, and Fritz Kreisler, all seated in the audience--to support a verdict that Whiteman, the celebrated lily-white "King of Jazz," had carefully programmed in advance. To show how far jazz had come from its scandalous roots to his polished dance band's smooth effects, Whiteman opened with the raucous "Livery Stable Blues"--involving barnyard calls and a tin can--and proceeded through "Yes, We Have No Bananas" to a Victor Herbert suite and, finally, to the rhapsodic piece de resistance. A defining moment of the Jazz Age, Whiteman's concert made it clear that few people at the time had any idea what "jazz" was.

The word itself was of mysterious origin--according to F. Scott Fitzgerald, "jazz" had once meant "sex"--and the broader questions of where, what, and who fuelled the notorious "jazz debates" of the decade. Blues or ragtime? Black or white? Serious expression or musically illiterate pandering to the masses? The contemporary press was the battleground, and Gershwin himself went into print with a series of articles bearing such eagerly pedagogic titles as "Does Jazz Belong to Art?" and "Jazz Is the Voice of the American Soul," all now happily reprinted in "The George Gershwin Reader," edited by Robert Wyatt and John Andrew Johnson (Oxford; $30). The volume also includes a selection of contemporary reviews, letters, interviews, and up-to-date studies that trace the course of the composer's fairy-tale career, from the Lower East Side to the heights of Gatsbyan glory, where the suave but ever marvelling fellow wrote to his brother Ira, "Flash! Mrs. Dodge Sloan is naming a horse after me. By Sir Galahad out of Melodia."

Given the easy beauty of the Gershwin production and the unpretentious and even naive charm of the man--friends invariably attested to the music as a mirror of his personality--it comes as something of a shock to encounter the anger and bitterness of a large part of the Gershwin debates, which long outlived the quarrels over jazz while adopting many of the same racial and social implications, and which offer a view of what Gershwin called the American soul, along with the apparently inseparable issue of our musical style. The voice of that soul, according to Gershwin, is "jazz developed out of ragtime, jazz that is the plantation song improved and transferred into finer, bigger harmonies." Writing in 1926 in the magazine Theatre, he reassured a nervous public that he was claiming not that the American soul was "Negroid" but that "it is black and white . . . all colors and all souls unified." This was the ideal behind the work he had planned to call "American Rhapsody."

Yet, with the possible exception of the original melody of the derided "Livery Stable Blues," no composition by a black composer was played at Aeolian Hall that illustrious day; in accord with ...