In the 1920s and '30s, American art, architecture and design were dominated by the striking version of modernism called Art Deco—also sometimes known as "style moderne" or "streamline" style, a functional, sleek fashion which borrowed from industrial technology to create a playful, futuristic, glamorous visual language. At the same time, American music was shaped by the striking new forms of ragtime and jazz in parallel ways. The great Harlem stride pianists—James P. Johnson, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Eubie Blake, Fats Waller, Lucky Roberts—fascinated and influenced composers like George Gershwin and Aaron Copland. A streamlined keyboard style as svelte as the Twentieth Century Limited—novelty ragtime or novelty jazz, it was often called—bridged classical and popular piano vocabularies. Novelty composers like Zez Confrey, Lee Sims, and Roy Bargy were wildly popular, and everyone's piano bench contained a few examples of the genre. This developed into a characteristic musical language as unmistakable as Art Deco's undulant chromium-and-Lucite cocktail lounges or Mondrian-like grids of glass-block windows—a style which could be dubbed Piano Deco.
One
pioneering American piano composer shaped by American vernacular and
dance was Sidney Eastwood Lane (1879-1951), who wrote piano suites and
miniatures that united a wistful, meditative vision akin to Edward
MacDowell's native American impressionism with an exuberant, rollicking
imagination that supplied extroverted ballet music for the great Ruth
St. Denis and Ted Shawn during their heyday. Lane composed with the
help of 1920s state-of-the-art technology—the Ampico
player piano, which accurately reproduced highly sophisticated music of
the era and which allowed Lane to study a keyboard piece as it was
played, the keys depressing as if by magic, the ghost in the machine
present in the performance. Later, some of Lane's own pieces were
recorded on Ampico rolls. Lane was a
fringe member of the Algonquin Round Table coterie, and a companion of
other Manhattan literati. Having grown up in upstate New York and
studied music at Syracuse University, he moved to Manhattan and spent
most of his life in Greenwich Village, uniting rustic and urban themes
in his compositions. He wrote pieces reflecting and imitating popular
music: Five American Dances (1919) contains The
Crap-Shooters (A Negro Dance), Around the Hall (A Dance-Hall
Ditty), A Gringo Tango, North of Boston (A Barn
Dance) and Powwow (An Indian Reminiscence), covering the
gamut from Indian dances through hoedowns through urban dance-hall
fads, all skillfully parodied. The dance idioms are wide-ranging and
the keyboard style original, idiosyncratic and highly personal. Perhaps
Lane's best-known work is Adirondack Sketches (which title
bows to MacDowell's famous and glossy Woodland Sketches), a
1922 composition with an explicit program, depicting a landscape that
Lane knew well, having spent summers there since his youth: The
Old Guide's Story, The Legend of Lonesome Lake, Down
Stream, The Land of the Loon (A Camp-Fire Story), A
Dirge for Jo Indian and Lumber-Jack Dance. The poetic
mood is spiced by bursts of ebullient jazzy dance music. In the 1920s,
Lane assisted composer Alexander Russell in producing a well-known
concert series at Wanamaker Auditorium. Three of his works were
orchestrated by Ferde Grofe for Paul Whiteman's big, ambitious dance
orchestra, among them a brooding tone-poem, Sea Burial
(1925), and an unbuttoned jazzy shout, Persimmon Pucker
(1926), and Minuet for Betty Schuyler (1925). Lane's work was
shaped by both programmatic and dramatic impulses. He wrote ballet
music with definite dramatic schemes, like the long 1928 descriptive
suite, Sold Down the River, based on Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Another piece (from 1933) is Girl on Tiptoe, from a longer
work titled Pantomimes. Lane evidently conceived much of his
music in vividly theatrical terms. He was also
attracted to exotic themes, writing mystery-tinged works like The
Blue-Robed Mandarins (1922) and Caravan from China, also
from Pantomimes (1933). Countering this preoccupation with
the foreign and outré was a deep interest in American
history, lore and culture, especially native literary themes. In that
vein, he composed works with explicit literary contexts or
programs—In Sleepy Hollow of 1913,
described as "four tone pictures" and based on Washington Irving's "The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and Fourth of July (1935), which in
ways reminiscent of Charles Ives recalls activities of the great
traditional American holiday. Lane's
publishing career spanned the years from just before WW I to the end of
WW II—his last published work (1944) was a suite
called Here Are Ladies!, which saluted a wide range of
archetypal heroines, including (characteristically) one as exotic as
Madame Chiang Kai-shek and one as homespun American as Ann Rutledge. He
traveled in literary circles, close friends with poet Edgar Lee Masters
and composer-promoter-musicologist Deems Taylor. But in his own
compositional career, Lane was something of an autodidact and eccentric
loner, following an idiosyncratic musical direction, indifferent to
fame and fortune. However, his music spoke immediately and directly to
a young midwestern (Davenport, Iowa) jazz hero of the 1920s, Leon Bix
Beiderbecke (1903-31), who in the last phase of his career would play
hot solo cornet with the Whiteman group. In 1928, the enterprising Paul
Whiteman made the only commercial recording of Lane's work (Sea
Burial) to have appeared before the present CD. Anyone
seeking further information about Eastwood Lane should see the thorough
and insightful essay, Eastwood Lane, by Norman P. Gentieu, Journal of
Jazz Studies, Spring 1976, Vol. 3 No. 2, pp. 58-84.