Welcome to the fifth installment of Bangkok After Dark, the story of an intimate relationship between Thailand and the United States during the Cold War, told at the level of nightlife. If you’re enjoying this series, please share the link to sign up:
In the last post, I described how Black and Latin music, including jazz and rhumba, circulated in Asia from at least 1900 forward. The influence of these musics laid the groundwork for a musician like Maurice Rocco to not only play in Thailand later in the century, but to thrive there. The main takeaway of that post is that the aesthetic worlds of Thailand and the US were never entirely distinct, even long before the War in Vietnam.
This week I return to Rocco’s chronology in the late 1930s. This is the time when Rocco was shuttling between New York and Hollywood, simultaneously becoming a star of nightclubs and films.
After returning to New York from this first extended trip to Hollywood in August 1937, where he filmed Vogues of 1938 and 52nd Street, Rocco was in greater demand than ever. He had a lengthy gig at New York’s Kit Kat Club in September, as part of the “Harlem Goin’ Park Avenoo” show that was held over for several months because of its box office success. His rising status was evidenced by high-profile ensemble concerts, including a charity benefit at the renowned Lincoln Theater in South Los Angeles in June 1937, where he was billed with Art Tatum. In the same year, he also formed his first band, a ten-piece ensemble called the Rocking Rhythm Orchestra, sometimes styled as Rocco’s Rockin’ Rhythm Orchestra. And as he toured live with this band, both 52nd Street and Vogues of 1938 were being widely reviewed and acclaimed in the showbiz press. Even as part of large ensemble casts, he and Dorothy Saulter were usually mentioned as the highlights.
In late 1937 and into 1938, Rocco continued to perform at the Kit Kat Club in Midtown, starring in a new revue called “Christmas Night In Harlem” in December, followed by another revue in February 1938. Not that Rocco needed any more lucky breaks, but the years 1938 and 1939 witnessed a sharp increase in demand for boogie-woogie, Rocco’s chief stylistic specialty. This was in large part because of a pair of now-legendary Carnegie Hall concerts held in December of 1938 and December 1939 called “From Spirituals to Swing.” These concerts, which featured top jazz and blues performers, staged what ultimately became a durable narrative of African-American musical lineage whose full span was implied by the show’s title -- from slave spirituals to the ultra-modern swing styles of jazz. Boogie-woogie was centrally featured in the latter part of this narrative. The concerts included boogie-woogie pianists Meade “Lux” Lewis and Albert Ammons, among others. From Spirituals to Swing led to a national craze for boogie-woogie in the ensuing several years, and Rocco profited greatly from the vogue. For him the trend could not have been more timely.
The majority of Rocco’s studio recordings were made for Decca, and released between 1940 and 1941. He was by then an upper-tier draw among boogie-woogie performers (if not quite as elite as Lewis and Ammons), and so it was fitting that he would record for the same label as Ella Fitzgerald and Benny Goodman. He cut fourteen sides in these two years, including the original compositions “Rocco’s Boogie Woogie” and “Tonky Blues,” as well as a number of covers or new arrangements of existing tunes, including the Broadway numbers “Donkey Serenade,” “Java Jive,” and “Tea for Two,” jazz standards like Joe Sullivan’s “Little Rock Getaway,” and the novelty song “How Come You Do Me Like You Do?” His records did not sell well, however. Speculatively, this might be because they couldn’t capture what Rocco excelled at most -- live performance. The Decca recordings are restrained and somewhat antiseptic, conveying little of the energy of his film appearances or club performances. The tempo is slower than in his live playing, and the notes more clearly delineated. The records possess what might be called refinement, but they lack the sense of excess that made Rocco a star. As a 1945 review of one of his recordings put it, “Rocco is a great showman, but on records you can’t see him standing up.” Perhaps as a result, remembrances of Rocco’s studio recordings are rare compared to commentary about his live and filmed performances. Almost everyone who talks about him retrospectively talks about his live performing.
This is one possible factor in Rocco’s profound erasure from the canons of jazz history. Performing, as opposed to composing and songwriting, has been underrecognized in the history of popular music, including jazz and rock, especially where notions of genius are invoked. It is common to analyze a musical composition as a text, to note its systems, patterns, and layers of meanings and intent. But it is uncommon to offer the same analytical treatment to an accomplished live performer, despite the complexity and labor of stagecraft. This derives from a raced and gendered hierarchy of musical skill. Critics and scholars assign intellectual value mostly to works that are written or recorded in some way, such as compositions, arrangements, or studio recordings. Jazz historian Frank Driggs tellingly refers to jazz arrangers as the genre’s “intellectuals,” for instance. In late capitalist aesthetics, inscription is mostly the domain of Euroamerican men. On the other hand, women’s musical expressions are often explained as natural outgrowths of inborn biological and emotional selves. Non-white performance is often similarly characterized as primal. These biases help to explain, in the case of gender, the decades-long history of Svengali-like male studio producers who lend an air of technical wizardry to the allegedly unskilled female pop stars with whom they collaborate. Women performers may align themselves with a male figure who can signify intellectual depth, such as Max Martin for Taylor Swift or Phil Spector for the Ronettes, for example. Such biases map onto race as well, and in this case help to explain the routine description of jazz performers like Rocco as titillating rather than artisanal. In this hierarchy of musical brilliance, composition and production are (mostly white, male) achievements of the mind, while performance is the (mostly non-white or non-male) result of bodies behaving mechanically. Leonard Feather’s 1984 Encyclopedia of Jazz puts this bluntly with regard to Maurice Rocco. Rocco, notes Feather, “is an entertainer rather than jazz musician, despite the intensity of his fast boogie-woogie performances.” For Feather, jazz as music and jazz as entertainment are mutually exclusive.
Academic music studies has often reproduced these biases, if mainly by omission. Thus, for example, there are many scholarly analyses of jazz composers in which scores are read as deep texts. But there are comparatively few analyses -- and comparatively few analytical tools -- for interpreting live performance as an intentional, symbolic, and thoughtful craft. And yet this is precisely the craft at which Rocco was excelling in the late 1930s. In this project, I hope to explain exactly how Rocco developed an approach to live performance that is worthy of serious study.
His remarkable stage presence will be the subject of next week’s post. Of the many techniques he excelled at, one is most consequential, as it was not only his primary marketing angle and the source of the deepest impressions he left on audiences, but was also the technique most widely copied by everyone from Little Richard to Jerry Lee Lewis: standing while he played the piano.