While jazz was flourishing, continuously increasing its audience, Béla Bartók watched the emergence of a completely new musical language with cool detachment. How did the composer’s attitude towards jazz change from the 1920s onwards, what did that attitude have to do with folk music, and why does Bartók’s universe continue to inspire jazz musicians?
“We don't need jazz, we have beautiful folk music; we don’t need to throw ourselves into the arms of jazz.” This quote from Béla Bartók would seem to cut short any discussion of the composer’s relationship to jazz. He and jazz appear to have remained worlds apart, with no spark between them. However, if we take a closer look at what seems to have been a dysfunctional relationship, we’ll find that, in secret, Bartók and jazz did become friends.
In her memoirs, Júlia Székely, who studied with Bartók, tells how he told her to immediately stop doing what she was doing when he heard her practising a jazz standard. When a few weeks later she went to a concert of Chocolate Kiddies, an African-American musical revue, she not only heard the piece she had been practising, but also met Bartók, who was known to be averse to noisy public events. The composer offered this explanation: “They know how to do it, whereas you don’t.”
Bartók’s rejection of jazz was not visceral. After touring the United States in the late 1920s, he gave an interview to Ellenzék, a Transylvanian periodical, and said that though he first found jazz a fascinating genre, insincere composers had rendered it superficial. He did not go into detail about who these insincere composers were, but it is fair to assume that Stravinsky was one of them: Bartók was completely dismissive of his Piano Rag Music, which made use of early forms of improvisation in jazz and the ragtime formula.
After her 2020 album of arrangements of Bartók's works, on April 5 at the House of Music Hungary, Júlia Karosi will perform her most recent album, which features folk song arrangements and transcriptions of classical composers, including Bartók, in addition to her own new compositions.
Photo. Gaál Dániel
Then again, traces of the influence of jazz can be found in Bartók’s own music as well. The most evident example is Contrasts, which he wrote for Benny Goodman. “It’s a fiendishly difficult piece – probably the most difficult in the whole clarinet repertoire,” said the jazz clarinetist. “I’m not sure how the record will sell; the ideas in this work are pretty foreign for American ears. But for me, it’s just incredibly exciting music.” In his book on jazz history A rögtönzés művészete (The Art of Improvisation), György Máté J. identifies distant reminisces of jazz in Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 1, String Quartet No. 5 and Concerto; the music historian Antal Molnár actually called the latter “hit song filth.”
How can it be that, despite all this, Bartók became one of the most important sources of classical music inspiration for jazz musicians, from Duke Ellington through John Coltrane to Chick Corea, and that his work had a larger impact on the development of the genre than that of Stravinsky or Penderecki, who were seriously interested in jazz?
Throughout his life, Bartók referred to folk music as the musical source that helped him to shake off the yoke of minor and major keys, and this compositional approach is very appealing to jazz as well. There is, however, a fair chance that the affinities are rooted even deeper, on the level of artistic credos and creative attitudes. Bartók started to take an interest in Hungarian folk music around 1906. It was already clear to him at the time that he either recorded this incredibly rich culture of the people or let it be lost forever. The birth of jazz is just as closely linked to African-American folk music, and the stakes were just as high. As in Bartók’s music, this folk tradition is at the root of every sound in jazz.
The composer’s revolutionary attitude to traditions, ancestors and the contemporary world not only inspired a nascent genre, but also provided a valid creative role model for future generations of jazz musicians.
The programme of Bartók Spring has been put together in the same spirit. We have sought out performers with the deepest knowledge of the origins of one musical world or another, who also have the courage to represent their own authentic, unmistakeable musical language, from classical through jazz to electronic music. And even beyond.
