Swing Jazz In The Machine Age By Le Corbusier

The book begins with a modernist architect, Le Corbusier, visiting New York City. Le Corbusier marveled both the city and the musical culture of African-Americans. He believed, “jazz is an event representing the forces of today” (p. 3). The forces of today are the industrialization and mass production of American society. He even goes on to state that American society is a “machine for living” (p. 3). Le Corbusier believed jazz reflected and contained chaotic yet continuous rhythmic flow that normal observers would view as primitive. However, Le Corbusier saw it as unequivocal and complex. He also believed African-American music and dance revealed the adaptation to modernity with the aesthetics of sound, flow, and mechanical rhythm. While …show more content…
One of the reasons why it was so popular in the Machine Age was because “its driving, syncopated rhythms reflected the speeded up tempo of life produced by industrialization in the American workplace and the mechanization of urban life. Jazz also reflected the hopes of African American’s for finding new life outside of the South” (p. 5) according to Dinerstein. Another reason presented by Dinerstein was that swing jazz was a moral and energy booster during the Depression. When Americans heard swing jazz play their whole demeanor changed. The American white man would gain an extra “pep in his step”. Swing Jazz energized American’s sense of capacity when machines were being …show more content…
During the Depression white American men saw themselves as obsolete failures who were worn out, compared to machines who were powerful, clean, and fast. The machines essentially emasculated and intimidated these men. Compared to machines, men during the Depression just lacked energy and if they didn’t fit in this category the media and their environments put them in this group anyway. With the arrival of swing jazz this outlook on life shifts into a positive one. As man became more rejuvenated the used machines to build more in the city. As the cities and machines grew big bands grew in size in order to accommodate the need for a louder, more humanly organized noise. To accommodate to the machine’s pace. Swing bands embodied the dynamic order that America needed during a time of despair. The overall implication for American culture was that man would not be overshadowed by machine and that man would use the machine for his bidding. With this, big-band swing music and dance humanized the machine world. Ironically, the same people that the white man saw and labeled as primitive were the same ones who humanized America during the 1930s. As time went on big-band swing resembled the black experience less and the cultural desires the entire nation wanted more, according to Sidney Bechet. According to Dinerstein, they began to whiteface swing. This whitewashing was transparent when