Approaching the topic of jazz and modernism, one might begin with the emergence of bebop, which was routinely called “modernist” in the 1940s. While the debate about bop replicated aspects of earlier disputes about literary and artistic modernism, the parochial nature of the debate (largely confined to fans, journalists, and record collectors) insulates it from the more compelling issues associated with modernism. An alternative approach to the topic might enumerate encounters with, and opinions about, jazz by recognized modernists. Ezra Pound, for instance, backed George Antheil's concert hall amalgamation of jazz with futurism, even as he disparaged the piano as an agent of jazz (confusing it with ragtime). But most of the modernists had little interest in jazz, and to detect fugitive traces of their encounter with it one would have to scrape deep recesses of the biographical barrel (and, in most cases, the evidence would illustrate a larger pattern of Negrophilia or Negrophobia, adding little to the study of jazz). A third approach, adopted here, is to regard jazz as a conspicuous feature of modernity as it was manifested during and after the Great War. In that capacity, jazz unquestionably informed modernism as intellectual challenge, sensory provocation, and social texture.

Around World War I, because of widespread uncertainty about what it was – a kind of music, an attitude to life, a mannerism, cheap vulgarity, or a spirited emotional impulse – the social career of jazz was launched with opportunities for interested parties on all sides of the issue to hold forth. “The word ‘jazz,’ in its progress toward respectability, has meant first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the lines of war.” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous pronouncement has served as the decisive link between jazz and modernism for seventy years. Although it is no longer tenable to associate jazz with anything he meant by the term, nonetheless, he pinpoints the controversy that made jazz appear responsible for upending genteel America with its Gilded Age proprieties.